We were going to get there.
Maddy was going to be okay.
And then I was going to kill Callum.
“Wolves.” Caroline said the word out loud, and I was reminded for the second time that day that she wasn’t a part of our pack. She wasn’t a part of this.
Yet, here she was.
“How many?” I asked, unwilling to distract Lake and Chase from their task with that question.
“I don’t know,” Caroline replied, her baby blues narrowed in concentration. “They’ve got a perimeter set. The wind’s coming out of the north. I can go around back, scope it out.”
I glanced at Jed, and he nodded. Caroline was impossible to track—even with werewolf senses, they wouldn’t hear her coming.
Like a thief in the proverbial night, she was gone, blending perfectly into her surroundings, stalking through the rough mountain terrain, a girl on a mission.
I turned to Jed. Darkness fell over his eyes, and that was the only signal I needed. I reached for my own Resilience, called up the power, and ran.
One second I was at the base of the mountain, and the next thing I knew, I was at the mouth of the cave. I saw Chase first, then Lake, both in wolf form. Their clothes littered the cave floor. Their hackles were raised.
Opposite them, Shay Macalister was smiling. He was bent at the waist, too large to fit fully inside Maddy’s den.
“Leave. Me. Alone.”
Maddy’s voice was wispy weak, but full of emotion. I stalked into the cave, past Chase and Lake, right up to Shay, and that was when I saw her.
Maddy was lying on her side, her face ghostly pale, blood smeared on her dress. And there, in her lap, was a baby.
A pup.
The newborn must have Shifted during labor, or soon thereafter, because there wasn’t a hint of baby-pink skin to be seen—only short, spiky fur, sticky and standing straight up.
Her baby eyes were closed.
“You’re mine,” Shay said, leaning over Maddy, kneeling next to her, his voice vibrating with power and want and need.
“No. I’m. Not.”
Maddy spat at him, on him, but she was too weak to move. She couldn’t move.
“Maddy,” I said, wary of coming to stand within Shay’s grasp, but knowing I had no other choice.
If he kills me, I thought, Callum will kill him. Right now that was cold comfort.
“Maddy?” I reached out to touch her cheek. Shay growled, but there was nothing he could do about it—first come, first serve, and he hadn’t managed to break his way through Maddy’s defenses yet.
She was fighting him—but she might not fight me.
“Mads?” There was a question in my voice. She hadn’t wanted this—not last winter, not when she’d left us in the motel room.
She nodded.
“Yes,” she said, reaching out and taking my hand, pressing my nails into the flesh of her neck. I felt my fingers curling, felt myself digging in deeper, drawing blood. Then I took all that I was—all that my pack was—and I threw it at her.
Chase and Lake and me.
Devon, at home with the kids.
Lily, Katie, Alex, Ali, Mitch.
Phoebe, Sage, and all the rest.
This was what we were. We were a pack made by choice. We were family.
Power exploded out of me. The air hummed with it. I stopped breathing. Maddy stopped breathing. When we started up again, we breathed as one.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
She was mine.
I turned to Shay, expecting to see rage marring his features—so like Devon’s I wanted to hurl—but the only thing on Shay’s face was a smile.
I didn’t realize I’d let go of my Resilience until it flared back up. This cave was too small, Shay was too big, too strong, and he was smiling.
We have to get out of here, I told Maddy, the words flowing freely from my mind to hers, as if she’d never left, as if it had always been this way between us, this easy.
Eyes on Shay’s, I hooked my arms beneath Maddy’s armpits. I pulled her backward. She scraped her heels against the floor, pushing, propelling herself out toward the mouth of the cave, toward morning’s first light, toward freedom.
Shay followed, but stopped when Chase and Lake came to stand in front of us, their lips curled upward, mouths open, canines gleaming.
Maddy was ours. If he attacked one of us, if he made a move against us, my wolves could attack him—and if his pack didn’t want to face the wrath of the Senate when it was said and done, they’d leave him to fight us alone.
Us, I thought, and reflexively, I scanned the woods for Caroline and found her, poised behind a rock, twenty yards away, gun in one hand and crossbow in the other.
“It’s over, Shay.” I shut my fear away—didn’t give him the chance to smell it. He couldn’t fight me, not unless he wanted to start something that Callum would end.
“It is over,” Shay agreed amicably. “And you, my dear, have something that belongs to me.”
At first, I thought he was talking about Maddy, but then a garbled cry escaped her throat, and I realized that he wasn’t talking about the girl.
He was talking about the pup.
No. A child was born into his or her mother’s pack. There was no Marking, no claiming. It was automatic—but Maddy’s child was born in No-Man’s-Land. She was born to a lone wolf.
I’d claimed Maddy after the child’s birth, not before.
With horror, I realized the implications. Maddy had fought Shay. She’d resisted. She’d been able to. But the baby—
“No,” Maddy said, the word halfway between a howl and a growl, not human in the least. “You can’t have her. You can’t.”
Shay walked between Chase and Lake, like they were nothing. To him, they probably were. He knelt, and as bile rose in my throat and my dry eyes burned with tears that wouldn’t come, he ran one hand gently over the sleeping pup’s head.
Maddy trembled, on the verge of a Shift. Shay gestured to someone behind us, and another Were came to stand beside him.
“Careful,” Shay told Maddy. “You might hurt her if you Shift.”
The Snake Bend alpha stood and faced me, my body dwarfed by his massive dimensions. “The little one is mine,” he said, “and there’s nothing you or your reinforcements”—he jerked his head toward Caroline, leaving me to wonder how he’d known she was there—“can do about it.”
Shay paused. “Of course, the pup might not live long without her mother. She might just waste away.…”
Maddy stifled a sob, and I saw the trap Shay had laid. He’d claimed the baby. It didn’t matter that I’d claimed Maddy—faced with the choice between watching Shay walk off with her child and going with him, to ensure the child lived—she’d choose the latter.
Every. Single. Time.
“The Senate will never let you do this,” I said roughly. “You can’t kill a pup.”
“A female pup,” Shay corrected. “With no twin. She’s a little miracle, isn’t she? And by the time you manage to call the Senate, she’ll already be dead. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Bryn? You wouldn’t want this girl’s baby to die. You wouldn’t hold her here, when she wants to come with me—don’t you, Madison?”
Bryn, please. Maddy met my eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was asking me to do something to stop this, or to let her go. I had seconds to decide, seconds, and all I could think was that Callum had let this happen.
“If you don’t believe I’ll do it, ask your friend with the gun.” Shay smiled in Caroline’s direction. The Were he’d beckoned forward—a man I recognized as his second—reached for the baby.
“The little girl with the good aim should know better than anyone”—Shay flashed a smile, full of fang—“I have no problem taking a parent away from a child.”
I remembered—too late—that Shay was the werewolf who’d given Caroline her scars. He was the one who’d killed her father. He was baiting her.
“Caroline, don’t—” I didn’t ge
t the rest of the warning out of my mouth before the sound was swallowed up in gunfire. Dully, I surveyed the damage.
A bolt, directly through Shay’s throat. Six silver bullets, clustered in his second’s heart.
Maddy pulled her baby backward and scooted away from the man who’d had his hands on the pup when Caroline had fired.
A purebred werewolf might survive a cluster of silver bullets straight to the heart, but regular Weres reacted to silver like poison. Shay’s second-in-command might have been able to heal from a single bullet wound. But six?
Shay kicked the man’s body dispassionately to the side. “Now this,” he said, ripping the bolt from his throat, “is an interesting development.”
Beneath the roar of alarm in my mind, I heard Chase’s voice.
Wolves, Bryn. Lots of them.
Caroline had told me that Shay had his Weres poised along the perimeter, but I’d had no idea how many. One by one, they stepped from the shadows—from behind trees and rocks, from nearby caves.
They ran in from town, from Shadow Bluff territory, from all sides.
There weren’t just a dozen of them, or two. Shay hadn’t just brought his guard. He’d brought his entire pack.
Even with Caroline, even with Jed, even if Griffin could break through whatever it was about the baby’s birth that had pushed him away—we were still outnumbered.
And Shay wasn’t the type to take an attack lying down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
AS THE SNAKE BEND PACK CLOSED IN ON US FROM every direction, I half-expected Caroline to sprint for the hills, to settle down in a sniper’s nest, from which she could pick them off one by one—but she didn’t.
It took me a few seconds to realize why. She wasn’t the only one with a gun. The pistol looked out of place in Shay’s massive hands, but he clicked the safety off and pointed it just to my left. A pair of werewolves pushed Jed roughly toward Shay—and the gun.
The old man could have flashed out.
He could have fought them.
But he didn’t—because he realized what Caroline did not. This situation was volatile. The Snake Bend Pack was the third largest in North America, and if Shay hadn’t brought his entire pack here, he’d certainly brought most of them—and all of his fighters.
“Come on down, Caro,” Shay called. “Unless you’d prefer to be responsible for the death of your mentor, as well as your father.”
He called her Caro, the way Devon did. He even sounded like Devon when he said it.
“Let’s have us a little chat, shall we?” Shay continued jovially, as Caroline came to stand beside me, her eyes diamond hard, weapons well within grasp. “As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll even have my wolves Shift to human form. I’d appreciate it if you would do the same, Bryn.”
All around us, the sound of Shifting echoed off the mountain, but this time, I didn’t feel the call or the power. All I felt was dread.
Caroline had shot Shay.
She’d killed his second-in-command.
He was going to kill her. She was Ali’s sister, and Shay was going to kill her. There was nothing I could do to stop him. She was a human. She’d killed a werewolf. She was a threat, and as far as Senate Law was concerned, Shay would be within his rights to put her down.
“Well, Bryn?” Shay smiled, and I realized he was still waiting for me to order my wolves to change to human form. I nodded to Lake and Chase. She Shifted back to human form. He did not. Instead, he came to sit at my feet, the warning clear in his eyes.
“Interesting,” Shay said again. “I didn’t know the Cedar Ridge alpha had taken a mate.”
That wasn’t a word Chase and I used—but the second Shay said it, I felt a spark of recognition from inside Chase’s wolf form.
Yes, it seemed to say. Mate. Bryn. Mine.
Shay didn’t leave us in silence for long. “Do you know the difference,” he said, relishing each word like a delicacy, “between a Rabid and an alpha who kills humans when the need arises?”
He didn’t give me a chance to answer.
“It’s a matter of subtlety. Restraint. Proper disposal of the bodies.” His teeth were so white that I wondered if he’d bleached them, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Callum telling me that the future was coated in blood. Now Shay was talking about disposing of Caroline’s body.
“Was it subtle when you killed the leader of a psychic coven?” I asked, my voice deceptively calm. I searched for leverage, a loophole, anything that might give me an advantage over Shay. “Was exposing yourself to an entire group of humans and leaving their hatred of werewolves to simmer for years subtle?”
This was the card I was holding in reserve. The only one. Shay hadn’t just killed Caroline’s father—he’d left a witness and allowed her to spread the tale to others of her kind for years. As far as blackmail material went, that might not be enough to save Caroline—but I had to try.
“What are you suggesting?” Shay asked.
I met his eyes, steel in mine. “I’m suggesting that you don’t want the Senate looking into Caroline’s death. They might wonder why she attacked you, and I don’t think you’d want them finding the answer.”
Shay was silent for one second, two. “You’re assuming there will be an inquiry.” He paused, his lips curling upward, his eyes narrowing to slits. “There won’t be.”
Shay was right. Caroline had fired the first shot. There wasn’t a Were on the Senate who would dispute Shay’s decision to kill her, so long as he didn’t risk exposure to do it.
She was only human.
“I’ll call the Senate myself,” I promised, letting Shay see the truth in my eyes, letting him smell it on my breath. “I’ll demand an inquiry. And once I present my case, once I tell them what I know—how sure are you that Callum will be on your side and not mine?”
I waited for Shay to call my bluff. If Callum had wanted to prevent this, he could have. I fully expected Shay to point that out, to tell me that the Senate was a democracy, and that—at the moment—Shay was playing by their rules.
But he didn’t.
“Is she yours?” Shay flicked his eyes toward Caroline, and I sensed a split second of hesitation on his part. “Is the human yours?”
Caroline wasn’t a member of my pack, but if I admitted that, Shay could and would kill her without repercussions. Since she’d attacked first, it wouldn’t even be a Senate matter, not the way Rabid kills were, and all that my calling the Senate would accomplish would be pissing the other alphas off.
But if Caroline were mine—if I claimed her as part of my pack, the way that Callum had once made me a member of his—then that would complicate the situation—for Shay and for me. If he killed her, I’d have the right to call his actions into question, and even if the Senate ultimately ruled that he’d done nothing wrong in killing her, I’d be in position to bring up the fact that Shay had murdered her father—and why.
Shay wouldn’t want the Senate asking questions, not about that.
But if I claimed Caroline as my own, that would mean that a member of my pack had just killed a member of Shay’s. He’d still have the right to take blood for the blood she’d spilled. If he demanded Caroline’s life and I refused to hand her over, he’d have the option of taking her transgression out on me.
Beside me, Caroline didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. She didn’t even look at me.
She didn’t have to.
We’d fought side by side these past few days. She was Ali’s family, and that made her mine.
No matter the cost.
“She is.” I sounded sure. I sounded alpha. I may not have Marked Caroline. I may not have made it official—but she was mine, enough that the words would have smelled true.
“Very well,” Shay said. “And the old man? Is he yours as well?”
I turned to look at Jed and saw that he was holding on to his control by a thread. If they rushed him, if they threatened him, he might lose it. He might flash out.
I’d hav
e to answer for that, too.
“He’s mine as well.”
The second the words were out of my mouth, Shay moved, quicker than my eyes could track him. By the time I’d processed the sound of gunfire, a bullet had already buried itself in Jed’s forehead.
Shay’s guards let go of the old man’s body and it crumpled to the ground.
Resilients might have been able to survive some things, but a bullet to the head wasn’t one of them. Jed had kept his control, right up to the end. He hadn’t fought back.
For me.
For Caroline.
And now he was dead.
Animal justice—an eye for an eye.
Caroline let out a cry that sounded more feral than anything I’d ever heard from a Were. She would have launched herself at Shay, attacked him all over again, but Lake caught her from behind. She held Caroline’s arms to the side, held her back.
I couldn’t think about Jed and the hole in his head. Not about the things he might have taught me, or what he already had.
I had to be the alpha.
I had to follow the old man’s example and keep my instincts in check.
Control.
“So we’re even,” I said, meeting Shay’s eyes. “Caroline took one of yours. You took one of mine.”
This hadn’t been the plan. When I’d claimed Caroline, I’d assumed that Shay would take her transgressions out on me. Not on the rest of the pack. Not on Jed.
“Even?” Shay closed the space between us, coming to stand right next to me, right next to Chase. “That,” he said, jerking his head toward Jed’s body, “was because she shot me. There’s still the matter of my second’s death to settle.”
Jed’s life in exchange for a wound that was nothing more than an inconvenience for Shay? That wasn’t an even exchange. It wasn’t even close, but if I brought the matter up before the Senate, they would probably support Shay’s assertion that killing one of my pack’s human members was reasonable compensation for another Cedar Ridge human’s attack on the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack.
Jed was only human, and preserving hierarchy and inter-pack relations was worth more to most werewolves than human life.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology Page 76
