Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “This is all Shay’s fault,” Devon said from the front seat. “He’s the one who gave Lucas to those … whatever they are. Shay probably sent Lucas there hoping that he would run to us and bring She Who Hunts to Kill right to our front porch.”

  That did sound kind of like the type of thing Shay would do. For a few minutes, the five of us were silent. Then Lake pulled into the parking lot in front of the restaurant and slammed the car into park. “So, who wants to share all of this with my dad and Ali?”

  “Not it,” Devon said quickly.

  “Not it,” Lake and Maddy chorused. Beside me, Chase let out a small howl, and I cursed under my breath.

  “Have I ever mentioned that being alpha sucks?” I said.

  “A time or two,” Devon replied, but he didn’t even have the decency to sound sorry for me.

  Sitting there in the backseat of Lake’s car, Chase and Maddy close enough that they felt more like extensions of my physical body than members of my pack, I tried to remember what it was like to be a normal teenager, but the next second, Lake popped open the driver’s-side door, and a burst of winter wind brought with it the smell of wet fur and cedar trees.

  We were home, and underneath the familiar pack scent, my senses registered something else.

  Something foreign.

  Close.

  Still in wolf form, Chase leapt out of the car and came to a halt a few feet in front of us, glancing back over his shoulder, as if to tell us to stay where we were. Undaunted, Lake sauntered forward, Devon on her heels.

  “Looks like Lucas is feeling better,” Lake said pithily. “Because unless my nose is mistaken, he’s not in Cabin thirteen.”

  Maddy glanced at me and then slid out of the backseat. I followed, concentrating on my pack-sense and trying to pinpoint who among our pack was inside the Wayfarer restaurant and what they were feeling.

  Lily. Mitch. Three of the older Resilient kids.

  They were in there, with Lucas. The same Lucas who’d lied to me. The one who was currently topping the Not Just Humans’ Most Wanted List.

  For once, the constant chill on the back of my neck that told me there was a foreign wolf nearby was drowned out by another feeling.

  I was now officially pissed.

  The first thing I saw when I stepped across the threshold of the Wayfarer was Lucas, his hands wrapped around Lily’s tiny frame. The first thing I heard was the three-year-old’s scream, shrill enough to shatter glass.

  Lily, I thought, my heart jumping into my throat. I was already moving for the shotgun behind the counter when I realized that neither Devon nor Lake was reacting like Lucas was threatening one of ours. A split second later, I registered that on the other end of the bond, Lily wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t hurting. She was ecstatic.

  “No, no, no!” she shrieked, trying to escape Lucas’s grasp but holding back just enough that she couldn’t. “No more tickles!”

  In response, Lucas hooked his arms around her body and flipped her upside down.

  “She throws up, you’ll be dealing with it,” Mitch told him, but his lips twitched, like he was trying to keep from smiling at the picture that Lily and Lucas made.

  “That dastardly fiend,” Devon whispered. “She’s never going to wind down in time for her nap.”

  Lily made a sound halfway between a giggle and a bark and kicked her feet. Beside me, Chase bristled, and I felt the hair on the back of my own neck rising in tandem with his hackles.

  Whatever Chase had learned when he went to see Lucas, the feeling I was getting, loud and clear, through the pack-bond was that he didn’t trust him, and now that Chase was in wolf form, his instinct to protect our territory was sharper, his bond to the rest of the pack harder to deny and his brain incapable of understanding human thoughts—or recognizing that, red-faced and screaming in the hands of the enemy, Lily was fine.

  He leapt forward, teeth bared, growling.

  I reached out to him with my mind but was met with the uncompromising certainty of the wolf. Lily was ours. Lucas was foreign. He was touching her, and the pup was screaming.

  “Chase!” I yelled at the exact same moment that Mitch took a casual step forward and grabbed Chase by the scruff of his neck. Bearing down on him, Mitch forced wolf eyes to meet his, and slowly, Chase sank to the floor.

  Lily, seeing further opportunity for mischief, wriggled her way out of Lucas’s arms and leapt to land on Chase. “Wrestle!” she declared.

  Before I could do a thing, the jumper she was wearing went the way of many play clothes before it. Shifting was simpler for the younger wolves: they melted from one form to another with liquid ease, and all it had taken to trigger Lily was seeing Chase in wolf form.

  Now in animal form herself, Lily bobbed her furry head slightly and then grinned, an expression that looked eerie on her puppy face.

  Slowly, awareness dawned on Chase. The human part of his brain realized that Lily was fine, that she was happy, and his wolf instincts recognized the unmistakable signal that she was ready to play. In the wild, play fighting was nature’s way of preparing wolf pups for the real thing. At the Wayfarer, it was par for the course.

  Lily pounced on Chase’s paws, and I looked toward the other kids, all of whom were valiantly holding on to their human forms, just to show that they could. Most of our pack were right at that age when they tried very hard not to want to be kids, even though they weren’t quite adolescents.

  “Go ahead,” I told them. “Somebody has to watch out for Chase. Lily’s going to decimate him.”

  For a moment, none of the kids moved, but I flicked my gaze over to them and made it an order, and that was all it took. They were off and running before they even switched forms, and as much as Chase didn’t want to leave my side, a silent please convinced him to lead them out to play.

  Or, more to the point, out of harm’s way.

  I pulled my mind away from Chase’s, but not quickly enough to keep from picking up that while Chase and his wolf would guard the pups, neither wanted to turn his back on Lucas, and neither wanted to leave me there with him.

  Luckily, Chase’s human half seemed to know that I could take care of myself, and his wolf half knew, on a bone-deep level, that I was alpha, and together, those things were enough to buy me some time alone with Lucas—if alone meant “with Lake, Devon, Maddy, Mitch, and Keely standing by.”

  Lucas took one look at my face, and he knew. I couldn’t smell fear, not the way the Weres could, but I knew what it looked like, etched into features that were trying desperately not to show it, and when I took a step forward, Lucas went as still as a corpse. I could see his pulse jumping in his throat, but he closed his eyes and stood there, waiting.

  Just like that, I was back in the woods behind Callum’s house, my lips bleeding, my ribs cracked. It had taken everything I had not to fight Sora as she came at me again and again. I’d swallowed every instinct, and with each blow, I’d lost a tiny bit of myself, of the life I’d always thought that I’d lead.

  I’d broken the rules, Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d stood there, just like Lucas was standing now.

  Pissed or not, betrayed or not, I wasn’t going to be the kind of alpha who inspired that kind of fear.

  “Maybe we should sit down,” I said. On all sides of me, I felt my backup fighting their own internal battles, their wolves crying out for retribution, and their human halves seeing what I saw and thinking that there had to be a way, some way, for it to be different.

  Sitting down at a table felt like fitting a noose around my own neck, but I forced myself to do it anyway and waited for the others to do the same. One by one, the Weres came to join me: Devon first and Lucas last, with Mitch, Maddy, and Lake spread out in between.

  For a long time, none of us said anything. I didn’t press Lucas. I didn’t force him to hold my stare. I just waited, and finally, he spoke.

  “You know,” he said.

  “And you didn’t tell us,” I replied, keeping my voice sof
t and even and wondering how it was that three minutes after swearing I would be a different kind of alpha than Callum, I could hear the man who’d trained me in every single one of my words.

  “Who did they send?” Lucas asked dully. “To tell you?”

  “Hey there, boy-o,” Devon said, leaning forward slightly. “I think we’ll be the ones asking the questions here.”

  Lucas glanced sideways and slumped lower into his seat. Maddy said his name softly, and after a moment, he nodded.

  “Ask your questions,” he said, wiping the palms of his hands on denim jeans.

  I didn’t have to be told twice.

  “What are they?”

  “Human.”

  “What else are they?”

  Lucas took a breath and then he shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it,” he said. “If there is, I’ve never heard it. They’re just humans who can … do things.”

  “Things like what?” Lake asked, and I could tell it was taking everything she had not to make the question any more leading than that.

  “All of them are different,” Lucas said slowly. “They each have an … ability. One of them gets inside your head. He can make you see things that aren’t there, make you feel them. They feed you silver, make you think it’s chocolate.”

  I thought of my dreams: the throbbing in my temples, the tone in Archer’s voice—pleasant, but deadly underneath.

  “There’s a woman, an old woman. She’s got a way with animals, a way of making them do things. She likes snakes, and if you’re a werewolf, she can force your Shift.”

  I really, really did not like the sound of that—not that being mentally set on fire was a walk in the park.

  “What else?” I asked. Since he hadn’t yet referenced someone with Caroline’s power, I knew he hadn’t told us everything, and I wanted to save my ace in the hole for after I’d squeezed everything out of him that I could myself.

  “There’s another woman, her name is Bridget, and she does this … whistling thing. It makes you forget. It’s like one second you’re there and you’re fighting, and the next, you can’t fight. You just listen. Even if they’re cutting you open, even if you can feel it hurting, you can’t do anything but listen.”

  I waited to see if Lucas would say anything else, trying not to fully digest the horror of what he’d already said.

  “They told me that they had someone who’s really good at finding things when they go missing.” Lucas laughed, and it was a miserable, hair-raising sound. “I guess they were telling the truth.”

  “You came here knowing they could track you?” I couldn’t help the exasperation in my voice. “And you didn’t think it was a good idea to give us any warning that someone might come after you? Even after we specifically asked you who that someone was, you didn’t think it might be pertinent to mention that they have about a thousand ways of killing people that normal humans don’t?”

  You’re getting off track, I told myself. Yelling at him doesn’t get you answers. He’ll either shut down or expect you to beat them out of him.

  That was what any other alpha would do—except for maybe Callum, who was all the more lethal for how seldom he resorted to using brute force.

  Think, I told myself. What would Callum do?

  My brain wasn’t forthcoming with answers, so I decided to focus on my pack’s own particular strengths. It was time to bring in the big guns.

  “Lucas, would you like something to drink?” The change in tactic took the Were completely off guard. Unbeknownst to him, however, that was more of a by-product than the point.

  “Drink?” Lucas repeated dumbly.

  “Like a milkshake or a soda or something?”

  Mitch caught my eyes from across the table, and it was clear that he knew exactly what I was doing.

  Careful, Bryn, he warned. The other alphas don’t know about Keely. If you send this boy back and he ends up tipping Shay off, we could all be in for a world of hurt.

  I knew as well as Mitch did that most alphas wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of a human who could loosen lips just by brushing up against someone or looking them in the eye.

  She does it all the time, I responded, sending the words from my mind to Mitch’s. And nobody’s figured it out yet.

  People—even the kind who turned into wolves on occasion—expected bartenders to be good listeners. Keely just lived up to that expectation—and then some.

  “Maybe some lemonade?” Lucas asked tentatively, and I tried to digest that the source of all of this trouble was the type of person who, when asked if he wanted something to drink, requested lemonade.

  In Shay’s pack, Lucas had never stood a chance.

  “Keely?” I called. She’d done a good job making herself scarce, but Keely was a smart woman, and I doubted she’d gone far. She probably knew as much about werewolf politics as I did, and she’d been the human equivalent of truth serum all her life—the moment Chase had taken the little ones out, Keely had to have known that her services might come in handy.

  Sure enough, a few seconds after I’d bellowed, Keely sauntered out from the kitchen and leaned across the bar. “You rang?”

  “Can we get some lemonades?”

  “Sure thing, kiddo.” Keely spun glasses out from underneath the counter like a pro, and Devon cleared his throat.

  “Don’t be stingy with the cherries, Keel,” he called back to her.

  Obligingly, Keely put a cherry in each of the glasses. I knew for a fact that she could carry four at a time without breaking a sweat, but she opted for carrying one in each hand, a strategy that would allow her to make several trips past Lucas and back to the bar.

  Anything happens to her, and we’ll be having words, Bryn. Mitch eyed me across the table, his expression deceptively mild. Lake’s dad might have been a part of my pack, but Keely and the rest of the folks at the Wayfarer were Mitch’s to take care of, the same way the rest of Cedar Ridge was mine.

  I did not want to consider the possibility of “having words” with Mitch any more than I wanted to think about something happening to Keely—which meant that I had to play this just right.

  “Here ya go,” Keely said, bending over to set one of the drinks in front of Lucas, brushing his arm as she did.

  “Now that you’re all beveraged up, mind telling me how many of these humans are after you?” I timed my question perfectly and managed to keep my voice casual and wry.

  Lucas never knew what hit him. “There were maybe ten of them total, maybe not even that many, but I don’t think I saw them all. Their leader was a woman named Valerie. She and Shay have some kind of agreement, I don’t know what exactly, but he did something for her, or she was going to do something for him, and I was just a part of the deal. There was something about a daughter, Valerie’s daughter, but I never saw her.”

  The information was flowing freely now, but I didn’t have time to sort through the significance of what Lucas was saying. Keely went back to the bar for two more lemonades, and my next question made its way out of my mouth as she returned.

  “How dangerous are they?”

  “Very, and they’re not exactly fond of werewolves. Something happened a long time ago, and now … sometimes I think the only reason they didn’t kill me is because dead dogs don’t scream. If I’d stayed long enough, the novelty might have worn off, but it also might not have. I’m not sure if they’ll kill to get me back, but if the killing involves werewolves, they probably wouldn’t consider it murder any more than one of us would report a fight for dominance to the human police.”

  Keely made her last trip to and from the bar: two more lemonades, one more question.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  It was a pretty broad question, but with Lucas’s apparent habit of hiding the truth until it blew up in his face, I had a feeling that the information I most needed to know was probably whatever he least wanted to tell me.

  At first, he said nothing, but as Keely leaned over
Lucas to pass Mitch a lemonade, the bottom of her arm touched Lucas’s shoulder, and his entire body seemed to relax. “I won’t go back,” he said, his tone conversational, with an iron edge buried layers underneath. “I’d die before going back to those people, and I’d kill myself before going back to Shay. I don’t care what I have to do. I really don’t, because I’m never going to let anyone do that to me again. When this is over, I’ll be six feet under or I’ll be free. For good.”

  Having said his piece, Lucas went very quiet, but his words hung in the air, reinforcing what I’d already deeply suspected.

  Sending Lucas back to Shay or giving in to Caroline’s ultimatum didn’t just mean turning my back on someone who needed my help. One way or another, it meant sentencing Lucas to death, because if the psychotic werewolf-torturers and megalomaniac alpha didn’t do him in, Lucas had as good as promised to kill himself.

  Between Keely’s power and the Weres’ ability to smell lies, I had to assume that he was telling the truth.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THIS TIME, I WAS THE ONE WHO RETREATED TO THE forest—and away from the rest of the pack—to think, and Chase was the one who found me. He’d Shifted back to human form, and I could feel him taking in everything: the way I was standing, the tilt of my head.

  “You look like you want to hit something,” he observed mildly. “A wall. Possibly a tree. Something hard.”

  “Lucas is going to kill himself.” I didn’t sugarcoat it, but my voice didn’t exactly reflect the black hole of emotion churning in my gut, either. “If I can’t work something out, if we don’t protect him from this family and from Shay, he’s going to die.”

  If Chase found what I was saying at all surprising, he certainly didn’t show it, and the only thing I felt through his end of the bond was a brief surge of dislike for Lucas, distrust, pity.

  “Don’t,” I said sharply before he could say a word. “Don’t tell me this isn’t my problem. Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. There’s an answer to this, Chase, and if I don’t find it—if I can’t find it—then whatever happens to Lucas damn well is my fault.”