Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Shay Macalister is a piece of work, Lake said. And if we can help it, neither one of us is breathing a word of this to Dev.

  On that, Lake and I were in absolute agreement. The last—and only—time Shay and I had come face-to-face, Devon had come dangerously close to fighting him on my behalf. In size and brute power, the two were evenly matched, but Shay had at least a hundred years of experience on Devon, and I didn’t want to add any fuel whatsoever to that fire.

  You ready to see what our visitor has to say? I asked Lake.

  I was born ready, Bronwyn. Lake punctuated that statement by releasing the safety on a shotgun I hadn’t even realized she was holding.

  Is that really necessary? I said, giving her a look. It’s not like you’re actually going to shoot him.

  He doesn’t know that. Lake waggled her eyebrows. And for the record, I’m packing silver, just in case.

  My gut twisted at the idea of using fear as leverage with someone who’d come here looking for protection, but as Lake had made abundantly clear, injured or not, Lucas was a Were, and he was healing. In a fight, Lake could take him, but she might not be able to get to him before he got to me. I didn’t think Lucas would attack either one of us, but in life-or-death situations, thinking wasn’t enough.

  You needed to know.

  The door to Lucas’s temporary room creaked as I opened it. It took my eyes a moment to find him, because Maddy was asleep on the bed. The covers were bunched up around her, and I knew that in her sleep, she’d burrowed into them, turning Lucas’s bed into her den.

  The fact that he’d let her—and that he was sleeping on the floor so she could have the bed—did not go unnoticed. That Maddy had fallen asleep in his presence was even more staggering. She wasn’t the type to trust blindly, and whatever else Lucas was, he wasn’t Pack. She shouldn’t have felt that comfortable around him; he shouldn’t have been willing to sleep on the floor for her.

  I felt a stab of possession spike through me—Maddy was ours; she trusted us—but that didn’t stop me from sending a silent message to Lake, asking her to put the shotgun down.

  With a glance at Maddy and a sharp intake of breath, Lake complied. I heard the click of the safety, and she set the gun near the door, her eyes on Lucas’s as she crossed the room and put her body between his and mine.

  “He’s coming for me, isn’t he?” Lucas was awake. His voice was dull, and on the bed, Maddy made a noise halfway between a whimper and a whine.

  “No.” I wanted to kneel down next to Lucas, to put myself on his level, but I didn’t move, allowing Lake—long-limbed and lethal—to stay between us at all times. “Shay isn’t coming, at least not yet, but he said something, and I need to know if it’s true.”

  Lucas pushed himself farther into the corner. Through the pack-bond, I caught a flash of an image from Maddy’s dream: the back of a hand connecting with a toddler’s chubby cheeks. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know who, but the fractured memory was enough for me to feel, just for a second, the intensity with which Maddy looked at Lucas and saw the life she and the others had lived with the Rabid. I glanced at Lake, and since I couldn’t kneel next to Lucas, she did.

  “We’re not looking to hurt you,” she said. “Not unless you’re looking to hurt us.”

  “I’ve never hurt anyone.” Lucas’s words rang with the kind of truth that I didn’t need a werewolf’s sense of smell to recognize as honest and bare. “I’m the one who gets hurt.”

  His words twisted like a knife in my gut, but I soldiered on, softening my voice but delivering the message all the same.

  “Shay says he’s not the only one after you.” I paused and measured Lucas’s reaction, but his eyes were as dull as his voice, and I couldn’t see anything in them but what I already knew. “Is he lying?”

  For several seconds, Lucas didn’t reply. Then he looked up, right at my eyes, for a single beat of my heart. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know as in you’re not certain, or you don’t know as in you have no clue why Shay might say such a thing?”

  Lucas retreated even further into himself, and when he replied, his voice was barely audible to my human ears.

  “The first one.”

  “So when Shay says there might be someone else after you, that’s not crazy talk, is it?” Lake kept her voice soft, and she didn’t make a single move toward him, but there was no way for him not to answer.

  Lake Mitchell wasn’t the kind of person you just shrugged off.

  “No. It’s not crazy talk.”

  The air whooshed out of my lungs as I processed our visitor’s answer. Lucas didn’t know for sure if Shay was lying, but he knew that it was possible that his alpha was telling the truth.

  That someone else was after him.

  And he’d come here, to my land, and asked for my help, without so much as a word of warning.

  “Assume that whoever might be coming after you is coming,” I told him sharply. “Who is it?”

  Lucas didn’t answer. I took a step forward, pitching my voice low and staring directly into his eyes with an intensity none of my wolves could have denied. “Is it one of the other alphas?”

  “No.”

  “Is it a Rabid werewolf?”

  “No.”

  “Is it your family?”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  “Lucas, we can’t help you if we don’t know what we’re up against. Keeping this information to yourself is the same as lying, and if you lie to me, I will send you back.”

  I felt, rather than saw, Maddy stirring, but she didn’t object to my words. If Lucas was a threat—if the people after him were a threat—we needed to know. She knew that. She trusted me.

  Lucas turned to look at her and took a ragged breath, and then he answered my question, his words coming out in a rushed whisper. “They’re human, okay? The Snake Bend Pack has dealings with humans, and Shay … loaned me out.”

  “He what?” Lake and I spoke at the same time. Maddy didn’t even blink.

  “Shay gave me to some humans, okay? Not forever, just for a little while, to punish me for whatever he was punishing me for.” Lucas brought one hand to the scar on the back of his neck, and in that moment, I knew that Shay wasn’t the only one who’d left a mark on his body.

  Whoever these humans were, whatever they wanted with a Were, they’d left their mark, too.

  “Humans aren’t even supposed to know about us,” Lake said. “The Senate kills people when they find out.”

  It was an ugly truth of our world that sometimes the secret of a pack’s existence took precedence over a single human life—even now. In all the time I’d known Callum, he had never lifted a lethal hand to a human, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the other alphas batted an eye at safeguarding our secret with that kind of force.

  Most Weres hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of Callum allowing Ali and me into his pack. Human females were for breeding, and most Weres accepted that only because there were so few females of their own kind to go around. The idea of an alpha handing one of his wolves over to humans was unfathomable.

  Lucas tore his eyes away from Maddy and spoke directly to me. “I don’t know why Shay does what he does. Most of the time, it’s not exactly advisable to ask, but when he got tired of beating me, he gave me to some humans and let them do the same. They were strong, and they had weapons, and I was restrained.”

  As strong as werewolves were, they could still be outnumbered, and Lucas wasn’t really on the more formidable end of the werewolf spectrum to begin with.

  “So, yes, Shay might be telling the truth when he says that he’s not the only one looking for me. They had me, and they hurt me, and when I finally got loose, I ran away. I turned tail, and I ran, and they might come looking for their pet werewolf, okay?” Lucas’s voice grew louder as he spoke, but the neutral expression on his face never wavered. “It’s not like the alpha is going to give them anyone else.”

  The alpha. />
  The words echoed in my head, and I wanted to drive my fist through a wall—or better yet, through Shay’s small intestine.

  Alphas were supposed to protect their packs. Sometimes that meant fighting an outside threat. Sometimes that meant being the bad guy to keep order within the pack, sacrificing the needs of the few to ensure the best outcome for the pack as a whole. But being alpha never meant throwing someone out like he was garbage.

  It never meant letting a bunch of humans cut into one of your Weres like he was some kind of science experiment or a slice of meat.

  “Are you sending me back?” Lucas’s voice was devoid of any emotion, quiet and clear.

  “We’ll see,” I said, which was the best I could give him. Still, for the first time since I’d read Shay’s email, the muscles in my neck and back began to relax. A known threat was preferable to an unknown one.

  Besides, we had an entire werewolf pack at our disposal. A small one, granted, and young, but still—how much of a threat could a bunch of humans possibly be?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I MADE THE EXECUTIVE DECISION NOT TO TELL Devon or Chase about my correspondence with Shay—Chase because I wanted him to form his own impressions of Lucas, and Devon because Lake and I had agreed that the less Devon knew about Shay’s machinations, the better. I did, however, tell Mitch everything. If someone was after Lucas—human or not—I couldn’t just leave the Wayfarer and the youngest, most vulnerable members of our pack without cluing someone in to what was going on, and there was no way to skip school without raising a pack-wide alarm.

  The fact that I was one of nine werewolf alphas in North America and had to suffer through the tenth grade was wrong on so, so many levels, but try telling that to Ali “Education Is Your Future” Clare.

  I had, multiple times, and it wasn’t an experience I was looking to repeat.

  So instead, I let Lake drive me to school and watched Maddy stare out the window as we drove, knowing without probing her thoughts that her mind was on Lucas—and unable to think of a single thing to say to distract her. Devon spent the entire drive looking at me with a familiar expression—suspicion, exasperation, and steely calm—on his face, and I dug my heels in and refused to allow my mouth to form as much as a single syllable of what he wanted to know.

  I could handle this, and besides, it wasn’t like I told Devon everything.

  Somehow, I made it through first period without giving my human classmates any visible indication that something was wrong. The last thing I needed was to fan the rumor mill flames, but for once, fate was on my side. With Thanksgiving break over, the entire high school was living on borrowed time. Finals were looming and winter vacation was less than three weeks away. My eyes were bloodshot, and with each passing lecture, I became more and more aware of the sleep I hadn’t gotten the night before, but that did little to nothing to separate me from my classmates.

  If anything, it made me blend in.

  At the front of my third-period classroom, my history teacher droned on about Oliver Cromwell, and the pages of my three-ring binder began to look increasingly inviting. My head drooped. Each blink lasted just a little bit longer than the one before. Every time I closed my eyes, I let the bond that tied me to the pack flare, assuring myself that everyone was still there, that everyone was in one piece, that they were okay.

  I breathed in and out.

  They breathed in and out.

  Somewhere, one of the younger ones Shifted, and with her transition, my entire body relaxed.

  I blinked.

  She blinked.

  And then I fell asleep.

  Smells! Smells! I wanted to inhale them, to eat them, to make them mine. My back arched, and I pressed my paws into the thick carpet. Oh, that felt good! The world was bronzed, the colors dulled, and the sounds—the words—all around me meant nothing.

  I rolled over onto my back and threw my head from one side to the other, going after carpet fuzz like it was some kind of worthier prey: a butterfly or a cricket or something soft and warm with a heart that went thump thump thump.

  Out! I wanted out, but something kept me here, inside, near to … something.

  Near to them.

  A flash of motion in the corner of my eye sent my body rolling over, and I bounded to my feet. Others! I could feel the pack! I could feel Lily!

  I flattened my ears and bent my legs. Opposite me, my pack-sister bobbed her head.

  Ready.

  Ready.

  Ready.

  Pounce!

  One second, I was inside my little sister’s head, and the next, I was watching Katie and Lily, both in puppy form, rolling around on the carpet. For a moment, I felt a pang of loss—for the excitement, the knowing, the smells—but then I was elsewhere, the pack silent in my head, and my ears ringing with the high-pitched whistle of a biting winter wind.

  Though it was dark, I could see perfectly. The world was awash in purples and black and deep, velvety gray. Like shad-ows, the trees melded into one another, and one foot after the other, I walked toward them.

  There, in the clearing, was a female wolf—the female wolf—her head held high, her coat snow-kissed and damp. I wanted to go to her, but by the time I got to the place where she’d stood a moment before, she was gone, and I was alone.

  “Too bad,” a light but resonating voice said. “So sad. Guess it’s just you and me.”

  I whirled to see the man from my earlier dream leaning back against a tree, his eyes locked onto my body, his face twisted with an expression halfway between intrigue and revulsion.

  “Hello, mutt-lover.” His tone was deceptively pleasant—rat poison dipped in chocolate. My temples pounded, and I could feel him inside my head, feel him turning me inside out, touching me—

  I took a step backward, but there was nowhere to go.

  Nowhere to run.

  I thought of the pack, tried to conjure up an image of them, a memory, the pack-bond—anything that might free my limbs enough that I could move, fight back, at least respond.

  “Isn’t that sweet? You think there’s a way out.” The man’s voice wove its way around my limbs, like a snake climbing up one leg, around my torso, and down the opposite arm. “You’re awfully young, aren’t you, wolf girl?”

  A flash of unadulterated loathing passed across his face, but I couldn’t tell if it was aimed at himself or at me. “Poor little girl, lost in her own mind. Poor little girl, lost in the woods.”

  He took one step toward me, then another, his dilated pupils turning indigo eyes nearly entirely black.

  Sweat rose on the surface of my skin.

  A circle of flame burst to life at my feet.

  I wheezed. I bit back a scream, and just before my body caught on fire, the roar of the pack broke through to my mind, and I felt a phantom hand latch on to my shoulder and pull.

  With a gasp, I woke up. My entire body jerked in my seat, and my history teacher stopped her lecture just long enough to ask, very pointedly, if I was okay. I nodded, but with the smell of smoke thick in my nostrils and sweat running down the back of my neck, even that tiny gesture was a lie.

  Hello, mutt-lover.

  I couldn’t shake the memory of the voice, and even as the rest of the pack flooded my senses with reassurances, gentle nudges and nips at the edge of my mind, I shuddered.

  The bell rang, and after a moment, I gathered my notebook and stood, my limbs stiff, the movement painful and awkward.

  And that was when I realized that my skin was angry, pink, and warm to the touch. To all appearances, I was sunburned.

  In the middle of winter. Inside my high school.

  I brought my right hand to my left and pressed my index finger down on my left wrist. I winced slightly at the subtle burn and then let go. My fingerprint appeared as a white mark on my reddish skin, but after a few seconds, the mark faded.

  My memory of the dream—and the expression on the face of the man who’d attacked me—did not. I could feel his stare, see the fi
re leaping to life at my feet, and even though he hadn’t actually said it, looking back, I could hear a promise passing from his lips to my ears.

  You’re going to burn.

  I barely made it to lunch, and I knew before Devon said a word that the others had picked up on at least some portion of what had happened to me—not the details, but enough to know that I was on edge, that the part of me that was Pack was calling for blood.

  An animal backed into a corner either cowers or snaps. Most werewolves weren’t any different, and human or not, I wasn’t the type to cower.

  “Dare I guess we’re eating outside today?” Devon asked, the set of his jaw belying the casual tone with which he’d issued the question. His hair might have been gelled; his shirt might have been fitted, but beneath the surface of his skin, the wolf was restless.

  He’d sensed the threat—they all had.

  “We’re eating outside,” I confirmed, taking a step away from Devon and trying not to listen to the quiet rumble of the wolf beneath his skin. I had enough going on in my own mind right now; I didn’t need to deal with Devon’s animal desire to protect me at all costs.

  I also didn’t need to deal with below-freezing temperatures and a wind chill disturbingly close to zero, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and the conversation I was about to have with Devon, Maddy, and Lake wasn’t the kind you could have in the middle of the high school cafeteria.

  Despite the intense chill, sitting on the ledge outside the cafeteria loosened the knot in my chest and stomach. I could smell the wind, the trees, cedar and cinnamon, pine needles and morning dew.

  “Chase.” Devon said his name before I could process the scents or let the warmth of his presence wash over me, and I followed my friend’s gaze out past the parking lot, to the line of trees that marked the spot where forest gave way to the town.

  There, standing guard, was a wolf as dark as midnight, smaller than some, but bigger than any natural wolf.

  Chase, I called out to him. Someone might see you.

  In wolf form, Chase didn’t speak back to me in words. Instead, I got pictures—mostly of me—and the distinct sense that if the wolf had had its way, he and Chase would never have let me out of their sight in the first place. I was what mattered to them, and my urge to find this threat and tear it to pieces was nothing compared to how much Chase and his wolf wanted to see me, smell me, protect me.