Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  Human. Teenagers.

  Run, and it will chase me.

  I ran. I jumped through the empty frame of a shattered glass door into air so humid, it clung like sweat to my skin. I ran harder, ran faster, ran like something was on my heels.

  Come and get me, I thought. This was what our killer wanted, wasn’t it? One human, alone? At his mercy? Defenseless?

  If I’d miscalculated, I’d just left the others to face the Shadow down alone. And if I was right, I might have just traded my life for theirs. I had no way of fighting this thing, no plan.

  I could only hope that if I drew the monster out, Lake might be able to help Griffin break through, and together, they might be able to do to this Shadow whatever it had done to Griffin, send it wherever he was now.

  Red, red, red.

  I stopped fighting my racing pulse, the acid in my throat. I let it come. I beckoned my Resilience. I lost myself in—

  Fear. The way it smells. The way it tastes. A small white room. No windows. No doors.

  The change was instant and unmistakable. The sound of my own heart beating was drowned out by things a normal girl wouldn’t have been able to hear: the slight wind working its way through each blade of grass; gravel and rocks under my feet; heavy breathing, all around me.

  It was here.

  I’d run. The Shadow had followed. Had I not already been in Resilient mode, that would have flipped the switch, but this time, I felt the rush of power like a current instead of a wave. Each limb, each muscle, each cell of my body felt it separately.

  It’s coming.

  I ducked, falling into a roll and landing in a crouch. I couldn’t see the Shadow, couldn’t make out its form, but I knew where it was. I could hear its silence, feel the bloodlust.

  I lunged to my left. It charged right. I dove forward. It came at me from behind. In a world of our own making, we danced, the monster and me.

  Fight. Fight. Fight.

  Harder, faster, farther, more. I couldn’t keep going like this indefinitely. Eventually, the Shadow would land a blow. Eventually, my knack would drain my body of everything it had.

  Fight. Fight. Fight.

  Without warning, the onslaught stopped. I felt nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing. A week ago, I might have lost hold of the state I was in—no immediate danger, no power, but I didn’t let myself.

  Couldn’t let myself.

  Flashing out—as Jed called it—took energy. If I fell back into an ordinary state, getting here again would cost me. Maybe this thing really was gone.

  But maybe it was waiting.

  So I stayed right where I was, my mind in a room with nothing but the sound of heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Endless, infinite, overwhelming.

  Fear.

  I stood perfectly still, caught up in a nightmare I’d made for myself, playing possum and waiting.

  Come and get me, I thought.

  The Shadow obliged, but this time, its form felt nothing like a person. This time, it felt like a wolf.

  It hadn’t wanted me to hear it Shifting, so I hadn’t—but if I’d been outclassed before, I was completely screwed now. I couldn’t keep running. Couldn’t keep dodging. The world settled into slow motion around me, but it didn’t matter.

  Paws caught my shoulder, knocked me down. Nails as sharp as knives dug into my shoulder, tearing through fabric and into skin. I felt its breath on my face and twisted viciously to one side.

  Teeth tore into my shoulder, instead of my throat.

  Survive. Survive. Have to—

  I was still fighting, still scrambling, still holding out and holding on, but I lost track of the details—of time and space and everything but the incredible need.

  To get out of there.

  To get away.

  To live.

  I couldn’t see anything but red, couldn’t feel anything but fear and power and red, red, red—

  And then I was lying on the ground, and people were yelling my name, and the thing I’d been fighting—the thing that had sunk its teeth into me—was gone.

  Vision came first, then exhaustion, then pain—a strange, numb pain, halfway between frostbite and a phantom limb.

  “Bryn.” The last thing I heard before losing consciousness was Chase saying my name—his voice aching and angry, equal parts boy and wolf.

  The last thing I saw was Griffin standing over my body.

  And then I was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I DREAMED ABOUT NOTHING. NOTHING BUT THE SKY overhead and the dirt under my feet. Nothing but rain that hung in the air without falling.

  Nothing but the moon.

  “If you’re dead, Miss Ali is going to be really, truly, exceptionally pissed.”

  I turned sideways and found Dev standing beside me. For a second, I thought he was like the raindrops and the dirt and the moon, but then he took a step toward me.

  “Bronwyn.” His voice was dangerously pleasant.

  “Yes?”

  “Picture, if you will, my feelings about Pierce Brosnan’s performance in the Mamma Mia movie, circa 2008.”

  I winced.

  “Now,” he continued, “picture someone forcing me to grow a mini-mustache and setting my entire summer wardrobe aflame.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Dev,” I started to say, but he didn’t give me the chance to finish.

  “And now,” he said, closing the space between us, “tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  This was Devon in full-on alpha mode—a hint to the person he’d someday be.

  “It’s not that bad,” I told him.

  He gave me a look.

  “Okay,” I said, “maybe it is that bad. But I’m at least sixty percent sure that I’m unconscious and that we’re sharing a dream. I really don’t think I’m dead.”

  Dev buried his head in his hands and then ran them through his artfully mussed hair. “Start at the beginning?”

  A rush of emotion—his, not mine—hit me all at once.

  I nodded. My teeth worried at my bottom lip. Then I told him everything.

  About Griffin.

  About Maddy.

  About Shadows and the one that had just done its best to kill me.

  Devon was silent right up until the point when I finished talking, and then he let loose. “Lake’s brother is alive and up until a few minutes ago, you thought he might be evil; Maddy’s pregnant; Callum’s knack is on hiatus; and the Rabid you’re supposed to be hunting is capable of tearing a person to pieces without ever assuming physical form?”

  Well, when you put it that way, it did sound really bad.

  Rather than acknowledge that fact, I concentrated on the last bit. “Shadows are hard to describe,” I said. “It was like, one second, he was almost solid, and the next, he was everywhere. When he was on top of me, I could touch him, I could feel him, but I couldn’t hurt him.”

  The word hurt was a reminder of all of the pain that awaited me on the other side of this dream.

  “How bad is it?” Devon asked.

  I tried to avoid the question, with little success.

  “How bad, Bronwyn?”

  I could have lied. In a dream, he might not have smelled it—but I couldn’t do that, not when we had no guarantee that this was an expedition I’d make it back from alive.

  “Two inches to the right, and this thing would have had my throat.”

  If I’d been any slower, any weaker, if my senses had been any less sharp, if even a bit of exhaustion had managed to beat its way through my altered state, I wouldn’t be here.

  Not in this dream.

  Not on this planet.

  I’d be splatter—like the boy in Wyoming, the girl in Winchester.

  Like my parents.

  My parents. I don’t know if it was the dream, or the fact that Dev was there, the way he had been the day Callum had brought me home, but the universe realigned itself, suddenly and without warning.

  I’d known that if I ran, the Shadow w
ould chase me.

  To catch a Rabid, you have to think like a Rabid, Sora had said. There’s a dark logic … a hunger …

  This thing was following Maddy. Torturing Maddy. And when I had run, it had come after me.

  “Devon,” I said, feeling like the earth itself had been jerked out from under my feet. “I need you to talk to Mitch and find out something for me.”

  I’d asked Callum how many female Weres had a dead twin—but that wasn’t the right question. Not now, after feeling that thing’s breath on me.

  Now that it had tasted my blood.

  “What do you need?” Devon didn’t hesitate, wouldn’t, no matter what I asked of him.

  I thought of the cabin in Alpine Creek. The dead animals. The Shadow’s human victims, teenagers all.

  “I need you,” I said slowly, “to find out if Samuel Wilson had a twin.”

  I came to on a bed in a different motel. Apparently, we’d become persona non grata at the old one.

  Go figure.

  Chase was lying beside me, his body curled around my smaller frame. On my other side, Jed was calmly and efficiently digging a needle into my flesh: quick, clean strokes.

  Stitches.

  If the Shadow bite had been numb before, my shoulder was on fire now. Lovely.

  “How long was I out?” I ground out. Jed eyed Caroline, and she tossed me a rolled up pillowcase.

  “Little over an hour,” she said. “Bite down on that.”

  I wanted to refuse, just on principle, but as the needle dug deep into my skin, I stuffed the pillowcase into my mouth and bit down as hard as I could, muffling the scream that wanted to make its way out of my mouth.

  I could do this. I could handle this. I hadn’t faced off against a ghostly opponent to be undone by a few measly stitches.

  “Is poor wittle Bryn going to cry?” I could see worry playing at the edges of Lake’s mouth, but her tone was an exact match for the time I’d broken my arm, when we were nine. “Don’t be such a bawling little crybaby. You’ll be fine.”

  Chase gave her a disgruntled look, but I found myself appreciating the distraction. It was easier to deal with Jed sewing me back together like a patchwork quilt when I had something else to concentrate on.

  To that end, I turned my attention to Lake and said something that does not bear repeating into the pillowcase bunched up in my mouth.

  She grinned, but the expression didn’t go all the way up to her eyes. I may have only been out for an hour, but that was an hour too long. She’d worried.

  They all had.

  “Almost done here, Bryn.” Jed made good on his words, and thirty-five excruciating seconds later, he tied off the last stitch. He smoothed something that looked like mud and smelled like booze over the wound and then bandaged it.

  I spat out the pillowcase.

  “Guess I can scratch ‘get eaten by an immaterial being’ off my to-do list,” I groused, trying—and failing—to find some humor in the situation. Beside me, Chase swallowed a noise halfway between a snort and a cry and ran his hand up and down my good arm.

  I could almost feel the pain flowing from my body to his. If he could have borne this for me, he would have, in a heartbeat.

  “I wouldn’t recommend trying to move that arm,” Jed told me—no muss, no fuss, no pity. “Unless you’re looking to repeat this particular experience.”

  More stitches? No, thank you. The throb of pain was constant—burning, aching, incessant assaults against each and every nerve ending in my shoulder.

  “I’ll take it easy,” I said.

  The rest of the room scoffed audibly. In unison.

  I took the high road and ignored their obvious skepticism. Instead, I focused on the real issue here. “The Shadow’s gone, but he could come back.”

  Griffin caught my gaze and lifted his eyebrows slightly. I thought I’d done a good job hiding my doubts about him, but the look on his face was enough to tell me that he’d known. He may as well have written do you believe me now? across the sky in large block letters.

  I nodded—as close to an apology as I could come when there was something much, much bigger at stake. The very possibility that the Shadow might be Wilson had changed everything, even though I had no way of knowing if my instincts were on point. Maybe the specter that had been following Maddy wasn’t the same monster who’d turned her into a werewolf when she was six years old—but maybe it was.

  That same monster had killed my parents, Changed Chase. The kids in my pack had once been his, until they’d turned on him and literally torn him to pieces.

  Female twin. Violent death. Those were the ingredients Callum had said went into making a Shadow. I hoped I was wrong, but we knew for a fact that Samuel Wilson fit at least one of those requirements.

  As soon as Devon got back to me, we’d know if he fit the other one, too.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It took me a second or two to figure out who was apologizing and another stretch of time to work my mind around why.

  “I thought having Lake here would keep me grounded—and it did, to an extent. I think our killer got tired of waiting. When he realized I wasn’t going anywhere …” Griffin trailed off.

  I thought back to what he had said earlier, about sometimes losing his grip on this reality. I hadn’t understood until I’d seen it myself, but now I had to wonder—what if the other Shadow didn’t choose to wait until Griffin was gone until it attacked? What if they couldn’t be in the same place at the same time?

  Without even realizing I was doing it, I let that thought bleed over onto Lake’s and Chase’s minds. With absolutely no ceremony whatsoever, Lake turned immediately to Griffin and proceeded to show him the exact same amount of sympathy she’d shown me.

  “Stop your caterwauling,” she said, though I could hear the undercurrent of sadness, worry, and fear in her voice. “That thing came here, and you left. We could all do with a few less sorrys and a little more figuring of the hows and the whys.”

  “Caterwauling?” Griffin repeated dryly. “You think I’m caterwauling?”

  Lake nodded and then made an imperious shooing motion, which Griff must have interpreted as encouragement to stay on task and start talking. With an aggravated look at his sister, he did.

  “The second before I blinked out, I could feel a presence trying to get in. There was this pressure, inside my head, outside it.” He paused. “Then it was here. For a split second, we both were. And then …”

  He stopped talking, and the moment he did, memories passed from Lake’s mind to mine. I didn’t know how she’d picked them up from Griffin, or how he’d known that she would be able to pick up where he left off. If the bond between them was that strong, why hadn’t I picked up on Griffin’s innocence sooner? Why hadn’t I believed what Lake was telling me? Why hadn’t I seen?

  Because you didn’t want to. I answered my own question. Because you couldn’t let yourself let him in—not after Lucas. Not again.

  I shook myself free of the thought like a dog shaking off the rain. Through my bond with Lake, I let myself feel what Griffin had in the second before the other Shadow began the attack—the incredible pressure, the chill, and finally, the pull of a vacuum.

  Pulling Griffin apart.

  Pulling him to pieces.

  “Two Shadows can’t be in the same place at the same time,” I said, mulling it over and wondering if there was any way we could use that little tidbit to our advantage. Besides an attack against the Shadow’s twin, that was the only thing we’d found that even approximated weakness.

  Facing off against Wilson had been bad enough when he was a corporeal Rabid. Taking him down in this form would be much, much harder.

  Maybe even impossible.

  “What are you thinking?” Chase was the one who asked the question, but I could see reflections of it on the others’ faces—all except for Maddy, whose pale face was carefully, curiously blank.

  “I asked Devon to look into something.” That wasn’t
exactly an answer, but it was true. “When he gets back to me, I’ll let you guys know.”

  I wasn’t going to dig up the past we’d tried so hard to bury, not until I was sure. At this point, all I had were a string of coincidences and a gut feeling, like lead in my stomach.

  I wasn’t going to rip open Chase’s wounds—or Maddy’s—for that.

  “I’ll go.” Maddy whispered the words, but there was a certain strength to them nonetheless. A finality.

  “Go?” Lake and I repeated, our voices combining to make the question sound more like an exclamation.

  “This is my fault,” Maddy said, enunciating each word with almost maniacal precision. “This thing is following me. The animals and the girl and that boy in Wyoming—it’s all me.”

  “Maddy.” There was something in the way Griffin said her name that reminded me of the way Chase said mine. “None of this is your—”

  “All of this is my fault.” Maddy wasn’t whispering anymore. Her vocal cords tensed with the weight of the words. “I did this. Me.”

  She had her hand on her stomach again, and I wondered what exactly she was blaming herself for.

  “You could have died, Bryn.” Maddy swung her gaze toward mine, but made no move to come closer to the bed. I struggled to stand, moved closer to her.

  Maddy didn’t bat an eye. It was like she was trapped in her own little world, her own nightmare. “This monster went after you. It hurt you, and the last thing I wanted to do—”

  She stopped talking and bit her lip. I could see her trying not to cry, trying not to remember.

  “It was my fault,” she said again, but this time, it felt like the two of us were the only people in this room. “Last time, it was my fault.”

  She wasn’t talking about the Shadow. Not anymore.

  “You got hurt. You could have died, and I should have seen it.”

  “Maddy—”

  “No!” She didn’t let me finish, didn’t even let me start. “You took him in for me. You made him Pack for me. I loved him, and he would have killed you! He was always planning on killing you, and I didn’t see it. What kind of monster does that make me?”

  All this time, I hadn’t realized that Maddy had been carrying the weight of guilt around, too—that she blamed herself for Lucas, more than she blamed me.