Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Hello, Lily,” I said wryly. The kid acted like she hadn’t seen me in a lifetime or two, even though it had only been an hour, if that.

  Moon! Happy! Fun!

  With the older wolves, I had to go looking for thoughts, unless someone was using the pack-bond to actively send them my way, but with Lily, everything was right there on the surface, bubbling up the way only the strongest emotions did in adults.

  Alpha-alpha-alpha! Bryn-Bryn-Bryn!

  The two words—alpha and Bryn—blended together in her mind. As the youngest of the kids I’d saved from the werewolf equivalent of a psychopath, Lily was one of the only ones who couldn’t remember the time before our pack, or the things that the Rabid had done to her, to all of them.

  In Lily’s mind, Bryn meant alpha, and alpha meant Bryn. It was as simple as that.

  “Can we Change yet?” Lily asked. “Can we, can we, can we?”

  Not yet, Lily, I answered silently, and she stilled, mesmerized by a power I’d never asked to hold over anyone.

  “Lily, I told you to wait.” The voice that issued that statement was aggrieved, and the look on its owner’s face was one I recognized all too well from my own childhood.

  Come to think of it, it was a look I recognized all too well from about a week ago, two tops.

  “Hey, Ali,” I said, glad that Chase and I had heeded Mitch’s warning and put a little space between my body and his.

  “Hey, baby,” Ali replied, a twin on each hip. “Everyone’s been fed, but I make no guarantees about their state of mind.”

  For most of my life, it had been just Ali and me, but she’d taken to managing an entire brood with the same efficiency with which she’d once transformed herself from a twenty-year-old college student into my protector within Callum’s pack. Ali was human, but the words force of nature still applied, and I would infinitely rather have tangled with an irritated werewolf than Ali in mama bear mode.

  “Now?” Lily asked, right on cue with Ali’s disclaimer about the younger werewolves’ state of mind. “Now-now-now?”

  “Shhhh,” I said, and Lily closed her mouth and laid her head against my knee.

  “You know, Bryn,” Ali said thoughtfully, “if Lily minded me half as well as she minds you, I wouldn’t be considering renaming her Bryn Two.”

  “Ha-ha,” I retorted. “Very funny.”

  Ali smiled. “I try.” She looked toward Mitch, and without saying a word, he walked over and took Katie and Alex from her arms. Not even a year old, Ali’s babies already looked more like toddlers, and in identical motions, their hands found their way almost immediately to Mitch’s beard.

  He smiled. “I’ve got them,” he told Ali, and she nodded before kissing the twins and turning to walk back out of the woods. Ali never stayed to run with the pack.

  As far as I knew, she never had.

  Now, Bryn? Now?

  Lily refrained from asking the question out loud, but I heard it through the pack-bond all the same, and this time, the answer—soon, soon, soon—seemed to come from outside my body, from instincts I couldn’t have explained to the human world. Lily seemed to feel it, too, and a keening, whimpering sound built in the back of her throat. I ran a hand gently over her bright red hair and she began rocking back and forth on her feet. Within moments, the others had arrived, filling the clearing, and the effect was magnified a hundred times.

  Our pack was small—twenty-two total, only eighteen there that night—but the air was electric, and as their thoughts swirled with my own, the connection between us became a living, breathing thing. I felt them, all of them: Lake and Maddy, Lily and the twins, Chase. From the youngest to the oldest, from those who thirsted for a hunt to those who wanted nothing more in life than to run …

  They were mine.

  Devon slid in beside me, and the moment I felt the brush of his arm against mine, I knew.

  It was time.

  In other packs, this was formal. There were petitions and ceremonies and marks carved into flesh, but here and now, I didn’t have words, and they didn’t need them.

  Now. Now. Now.

  I couldn’t deny the Change any more than they could. The treetops scattered moonlight across our faces, and I inclined my head. That was all it took.

  At any other time of the month, the sound of tearing fabric and crunching bones wasn’t a pleasant one, but under the full moon, the effect was like the beating of a drum.

  Run. Run. Run.

  All around me, they could taste it. They could feel it. Furred bodies pushed at each other to get closer to me, to touch me, to sniff me, to be with me, and the roar from their minds was overwhelming.

  Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

  I forgot about Chase, about Devon, about each and every one of them as anything other than my brothers, my sisters, my people, my pack.

  Mine.

  This was what I’d been born for. This was all that I wanted and all that I was, and as one overwhelming, unstoppable, incredible force, we ran.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SATED AND SOOTHED, THE PACK SLEPT. MY ALL-TOO-human body was worn past all endurance, but for the first time in days, my pack-sense was calm, and the others’ minds were quiet in my own. Their presences ebbed and flowed at the edge of my consciousness, and as I finally collapsed onto my bed, the protests of my aching body dissolved into infinity, into nothing.

  I dreamed of wet grass and fallen leaves that crunched under my bare feet as I walked. I couldn’t see my body, couldn’t make out the outline of a single rock or tree, but I shrugged off the blindness as a mild inconvenience. My body knew what it was doing better than I did, and the scents I took in with each step were rich and familiar: damp soil and dew, cedar and cinnamon.

  A sound. To my left.

  My nose twitched and I whirled, my hair fanning out around me, my knees bent, ready to pounce.

  Ready, if necessary, to run.

  For a moment, there was silence. A twig snapped. Leaves rustled, and then I made out the faint sound of paws on wet ground.

  A wolf.

  I knew that much with certainty, but who the wolf was and why it had come here, I had no idea. The list of people who wanted to see me dead wasn’t short enough that I could ignore the possibility of a threat. Still, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t coerce my feet into moving, couldn’t keep my body from crouching down or my arm from moving to hold out a beckoning hand, palm up.

  What was I doing?

  The wolf moved closer, until I could feel the heat of its body, the warmth of its breath against my palm. I wanted to see, willed myself to see, and then there was light.

  The wolf in question was female, larger than some but, based on the size of her paws, not quite full grown. She was thin—and, I knew instinctively, fast—built along lean, muscular lines that were almost masked by thick honey-brown fur that gave way to darker markings around her face and a bit of white near each of her paws.

  She brought her eyes to mine, and there was something regal about the motion. I held my breath. I waited. She showed her teeth. She ducked her head. Finally, slowly, she stepped forward, that much closer to my outstretched hand.

  And then the world froze and we were caught like that, inches apart, neither one of us able to close the gap. I fought the paralysis, but it didn’t break until the scene around me had shifted and I found myself back in the clearing, the ground covered in snow, my body wrapped up in layers and layers of clothing and the wind whipping my hair at my face. It took me a moment to remember that after our run, I’d gone back to the cabin and fallen asleep in my own bed.

  I’m still asleep, I thought. I’m at home in my bed, asleep. This is just a dream.

  Despite the realization, I looked for the rest of my pack. I searched for them, with my eyes and with the part of me that knew each and every one of them like they were extensions of my own body.

  I looked for the strange wolf who’d almost brought her nose to touch my hand.

  But all I saw was a human, a str
anger. A man. The part of my brain that thought like a girl recognized the cockiness in his expression and put his age at five or six years older than me.

  The part of me that thought like Pack felt his presence like white noise, high-pitched and deafening.

  Threat. Threat. Threat.

  My instincts returned full throttle, and I braced myself for a fight, but the man never blinked, his light eyes focused on mine, his head tilted slightly to one side. Slowly, he raised his right hand, the same way I’d beckoned forward the wolf.

  I felt the fight drain out of me, like a tire going flat. Mesmerized, I walked toward the stranger with the diamond-hard eyes, and a serpentine smile spread over his face. Flames leapt to life at the ends of his fingertips, and I froze.

  Eyes glittering, he lifted one flaming hand and waved.

  Just a dream, I told myself. It’s just a dream.

  With the smell of smoke thick in my nostrils, I woke up.

  “Have to say, Bryn, you look like the kind of happy that’s not.” Keely softened those words by setting a root beer float down in front of me on the bar and dangling a straw just out of my grasp. “What gives, kid?”

  By profession, Keely was a bartender. By nature, she was supernaturally good at getting secrets out of people, and in the past six months, she’d become the third in the trio of adults in all of our lives, the cool aunt to Mitch’s and Ali’s more parental presences.

  Long story short: no matter how much I didn’t want to talk about the way I’d woken up that morning, covered in sweat and ready to swear that the house was on fire, I didn’t stand a chance of keeping my mouth shut.

  Knowing my own limitations, I leaned forward and grabbed the straw out of her hand. “Nothing gives. I just didn’t sleep very well.”

  Because werewolves had a habit of sniffing out lies—literally—I’d spent years training myself to tiptoe around the truth. Rather than fight the compulsion to tell Keely everything she wanted to know, I made an effort at telling her the most abbreviated version of the truth I could manage.

  “Bad dreams.”

  Keely tilted her head to the side. “What kind of bad dreams?”

  I thought on the question for a couple of seconds before the bartender’s uncanny ability for getting answers—which we called a knack—had my lips moving completely of their own volition.

  “One second, I was dreaming, and the next, it was like I was being watched.” I shuddered, remembering the way the cocky stranger had observed me, like I was some kind of specimen under a microscope.

  “Do you think it was anything?” Keely’s question was deceptively simple, and she masked its significance by turning her back on me and going to get refills for the handful of other patrons who’d found themselves at the Wayfarer on Thanksgiving Day.

  Grateful for the temporary respite, I considered her question: did I think there was something to this dream?

  Yes.

  Whether the answer was mine as a human or the result of the pack-sense that had long since woven itself into the pattern of my thoughts, I couldn’t say. In either case, I wasn’t keen to share it with Keely, who would relay my answer to Mitch, who told everything to Ali, no questions asked.

  Sometimes Keely’s knack really sucked.

  Taking a final slurp of my root beer float, I slipped off the bar stool and headed for the exit. “Bye, Keely.”

  Behind me, Keely snorted. “Leaving so soon?”

  Once I was safely out of range, I paused to give Keely a disgruntled look and caught sight of Lake plunking her elbows down on a nearby pool table. I could tell by Lake’s posture that she was preparing to lecture a couple of our twelve-year-old pack-mates on the art of the hustle.

  “If you go in looking like you could tear them to pieces, they’ll hedge their bets. The trick is to look completely defenseless.”

  I found myself nodding in agreement with Lake’s lesson, because those were words to live by—in pool and in life.

  The way Keely looked and the fact that she was human kept most Weres from realizing that she had a way of making people admit things they had no desire to say out loud, and it wasn’t like I looked like much of a threat. Our entire pack was a testament to the power of being underestimated. We were younger and smaller and newer to the werewolf game than any of the other packs, but like Keely—like me—my charges were more than they appeared to be.

  Most werewolves had at least one werewolf parent, but my pack—aside from Devon and Lake and a few others—was different. I was human, and the others had been at one point, too. The only difference was that they’d been bitten, and I hadn’t.

  Most humans didn’t have what it took to survive a major werewolf attack, but those of us who did had one thing in common—a knack for survival.

  We called it Resilience.

  I’d spent most of my life as the underdog (no pun intended), so supernaturally good survival instincts had come in handy more than once—and I was fairly certain they would again. Or at least, I hoped they would.

  Soon.

  Images from my dream—eyes watching me, flaming fingertips, waving hello—flashed like lightning through my brain, leaving an impression in their wake that I couldn’t quite shake, but I did my best to keep them from bleeding out to the rest of the pack. Leaving Lake to her lecturing, I pushed the front door open and was greeted by a chilly breeze and a feeling of wrongness that I recognized all too well: the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, the smell of black pepper and rotting leaves.

  My back arched, and the only thing that saved me from growling was that I wasn’t actually a Were.

  Wolf. Foreign wolf.

  My pack-sense went into overdrive, as it always did when a strange werewolf stepped foot onto Cedar Ridge land. Territory was everything to people like us, and though we allowed peripheral males from other packs to cross through our slice of Montana on a semi-regular basis, my reaction to their presence was always, for the first few seconds at least, completely visceral. Instinctively, my eyes scanned the grass lot, looking for the intruder in question, and the moment they landed on a familiar form, my pack-sense relaxed, and my stomach tightened with nausea and guilt.

  “Casey.” I greeted him with a nod, giving no visible indication of weakness. I’d been taught to hide my emotions by the master, and even though my temper had a tendency to get away from me, I could have written the book on pretending to be okay when a major part of you wasn’t.

  “Bryn.” Casey returned my nod but didn’t quite meet my gaze. Within my own pack, everything seemed so natural, but interacting with people from other packs—older male people in particular—was a jarring reminder of my alpha status. I was sixteen, female, and human and had at one point been this man’s subordinate.

  The only thing that made his deference now more awkward was the fact that a lifetime ago, he’d been married to Ali.

  If it hadn’t been for me, he still would be.

  “Ali’s back in the kitchen,” I said, trying not to let my mind go back to the night less than a year ago when Casey had stood by and watched me being ceremonially beaten for breaking faith with Callum’s pack. That Ali’s then-husband had done nothing to stop it was something my foster mother would never, even for a moment, forget. “She and Mitch are working on getting dinner rolling. The twins are around here somewhere—you know how it is.”

  Babies were prized in any pack, and Katie and Alex had no end of teen and preteen admirers anxious to pull babysitting duty whenever Ali needed a break.

  “I know how it is, Bryn.”

  Before Ali had left Casey, the twins had been the darlings of Callum’s pack. Now even their father was relegated to the occasional holiday visit, which reminded me …

  “Ali didn’t say you were coming.” I met Casey’s eyes, and he glanced away.

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” he said with a shrug that looked—to my eyes—almost like a challenge. “My family is here.”

  Werewolf law dictated that Casey’s ability to visit C
edar Ridge lands depended on my consent, but given that I was a large part of the reason he’d lost Ali—and the twins—I wasn’t about to bring Pack politics into this.

  “Kitchen’s right through the back. You can go surprise Ali and Mitch yourself.”

  Casey’s jaw clenched when I said Mitch’s name, and I kicked myself for inadvertently baiting him. Werewolves tended to be possessive of their females, and one very human divorce hadn’t managed to convince Casey’s inner wolf that Ali wasn’t his anymore.

  Luckily, however, I had no illusions whatsoever about Ali being incapable of taking care of herself. She had even less tolerance for dominance maneuvers than I did, and if there was something going on between her and Mitch, I doubted she’d think it was Casey’s business any more than she thought it was mine.

  “Good luck.”

  My words caught Casey off guard, and for a moment, he looked like he might actually smile. Instead, he held out a small package wrapped in brown paper.

  “From Callum,” he said. “For you.”

  I took the package and pushed down the urge to tear immediately through the paper, the way I’d opened Callum’s gifts when I was little. Things were different now, and this was a token from one alpha to another. The situation called for a little dignity.

  The second Casey stepped inside the Wayfarer and the door shut behind him, I ripped through the paper, shredding it to reveal a small green box underneath. Since I seriously doubted Callum had sent me a box, I dropped the paper and began gently tugging the lid off the top of the package to reveal …

  A teeny, tiny stallion?

  Carved from dark cherry wood, it bore the mark of Callum’s craftsmanship: smooth, even strokes of a carving knife he’d carried in his pocket for as long as I could remember. As an artist, I favored materials lifted from the recycling bin or stolen off bulletin boards around town. Callum carved wood, and apparently, he’d carved this piece for me.

  I turned the box upside down, and the horse, no bigger across than the width of my hand, fell out into my palm. There was no note, no explanation—just a little wooden horse that, for whatever reason, Callum had sent to me.