Chase didn’t argue, didn’t tell me to lower my voice.
“You want to hit something?” he said in an even tone. “Hit me.”
I was standing there, yelling at him, and all he did was meet my eyes, his face impassive. How many times had I seen that exact expression, that same control, on Callum’s face when I was growing up?
“Go on, Bryn.”
Go on, what? Hit him? Hurt him? He was Pack, and he was Chase. I would have died first. Wasn’t that the problem? The list of people I had to protect—the ones who mattered—it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and no matter what I did, someone was going to get hurt.
“Shay. Caroline. That guy in your dreams. They’re messing with you, Bryn. They’re baiting you, and they’re hurting you, and if you don’t let it out and take a swing at something, you’re going to explode. So let’s have it.” Chase motioned me forward. “I can take it. Promise.”
He grinned.
Without even thinking, I swung. Chase ducked, lightning quick and impossibly coordinated, and I swung again, my fist tearing through the air and just missing the side of his cheek.
Again.
And again.
And again.
I didn’t lay a hand on him. Not once, but I kept going until the pent-up fury inside me broke and gave way to something else.
I couldn’t fight Chase, couldn’t match a Were’s speed or strength, no matter how hard I tried, just like I couldn’t keep Archer or Caroline from entering my dreams and showing up at school. I couldn’t make Shay sorry for the things he’d done to Lucas, and I couldn’t snap my fingers and make being alpha any easier.
I was what I was. The situation was what it was. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t easy, and maybe Chase was right, and I couldn’t save everyone—but I could try. Because that was the kind of alpha—the kind of person—I was.
The pace of my swings slowed, and Chase caught my arms in his. He pulled me close, and I breathed in raggedly, laying my head against his chest, vulnerable, spent. For a few precious seconds, I felt the borders between the two of us give, felt our connection as strongly as I had before there’d been a pack or an alpha or anything but the two of us.
I felt his wolf—animal instinct, undiluted and sure—as if it were my own.
“Thanks,” I said finally, pulling back just far enough that I could say the words to his face. “I needed that.”
And even though he had to have known, from that split second when we were more like one person than two, that I wasn’t backing off this, that I couldn’t just take care of myself, no matter how badly he wanted that for me, he nodded, his lips turning up subtly on the ends.
“Anytime.”
“Ali, I’m home!”
My words echoed through our cabin, and Ali called back that she was in the twins’ room. I took a deep breath and then followed the sound of her voice. Somehow, my ability to adopt a poker face when interrogating werewolves evaporated the moment it was just Ali and me, and I took a few seconds to try to wipe the evidence of the day’s events from my eyes, mouth, and brow.
What Ali didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her—and more to the point, what Ali didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.
“Hey.” I poked my head into the twins’ room. For a split second, Ali held my eyes, and then she turned back to folding clothes into the dresser drawers.
“Mitch called.” Ali’s voice was muted. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking—or what, exactly, Lake’s dad had told her.
“Oh.”
“Yes,” Ali replied. “Oh.” She shut the drawer and then turned to leave the nursery, gesturing for me to follow.
I did.
When we got to the living room, I expected her to start lecturing, or to go into fierce-and-overprotective mode, but she didn’t. She just smoothed down my hair and wrapped one arm around me.
“We’ll get through this,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to be dealing with something like this, but you are, and you have to, and I can’t change that. I can’t make it go away.” Even though Ali’s voice was perfectly calm, I knew that saying those words was costing her. Ali had always protected me. She’d stood up to werewolves for me when I was too little to do it for myself. She’d given up a whole other life for me, twice: once when she’d left the human world to raise me in Callum’s pack, and later when she’d left her werewolf husband and her home in the Stone River Pack to keep me safe.
But now I had responsibilities of my own. I couldn’t stay out of this, even if I wanted to—not for Ali, not for Chase, not for anyone—and I loved her for knowing that and for not asking me to, even if a part of her felt like she’d failed me because at sixteen I had the weight of the world on my back.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. Admitting that was nearly impossible, but this was Ali, and I couldn’t hold the words back. “No matter what I decide, someone gets hurt.”
Not emotionally hurt. Not kiss-it-and-make-it-all-better hurt. Dead.
“If we don’t help Lucas, he’s going to die, and if we do …” I searched Ali’s eyes. “Did Mitch tell you? About the … family of people with … knacks?”
“Psychics,” Ali corrected absentmindedly. “Humans with special abilities are called psychics.”
Somehow, the word psychic didn’t seem to do justice to the whole “burn you while you sleep” thing, but I didn’t see much point in arguing semantics.
“Okay, so there’s a family of psychics, and if we don’t hand Lucas over in the next seven days, I’m pretty sure they’re going to come after us, and even if we can take them, it won’t be pretty.”
There would be losses, and the idea of digging a hole in the forest and burying Devon or Lake or Chase—or, God forbid, one of the younger kids—was insurmountable.
“It’s an impossible choice, Bryn, and if you want me or Mitch to make it for you, if you want us to be the ones who make the call, and you just deliver it …” Ali tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and the casual gesture of affection almost brought me to my knees. “Say the word, Bryn. You have to do this, but you don’t have to do it alone.”
What kind of alpha was I that her offer tempted me? What kind of daughter was I that part of me would rather have Ali’s hands bloodied than my own?
“No,” I said softly. There was no getting out of this, no way to un-become what I was.
Ali sighed. “Color me shocked.”
“I have to do this, Ali. I’m the reason Lucas is here. I’m the reason Shay beat him down and gave him to a bunch of psychics to use as a pincushion. I’m the one the kids look to, and I’m the one who’s supposed to protect them.”
Ali folded her arms over her chest. “And who’s the one who’s supposed to protect you?”
That seemed to be a popular question lately.
“Who’s the parent?” she asked. “Who’s the wise and benevolent Cool Mom type?”
I cracked a smile—the first in what felt like forever. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
Ali pretended to be offended. “Are you trying to say that I’m not cool?”
“Fine. You’re cool. You’re the epitome of cool. Everyone wishes they could have mom hair just like yours.”
Ali hooked an arm around my neck. “I do not have mom hair,” she said, “and you don’t have to do this on your own. I know you—you’ll look for other choices. Ways to keep Lucas safe without endangering the pack. And I hope to God you find one, kiddo, but either way, deal me in. They’re my family, too, and you have no idea how dangerous some psychics can be.”
Between Caroline’s little demonstration at lunch and the fading burn on my skin, I was fairly certain I did have some idea of what we were dealing with, but I didn’t argue with Ali—mainly because my foster mother telling me that I didn’t know how dangerous people like this could be meant that for some reason, she did.
“You have experience with psychics?” I asked.
Ali pressed her lips together in a thin line and then wiped her han
ds on her jeans and nodded. “You could say that.”
Her words hung in the air between us, and Ali turned toward the kitchen. “If they lay a hand on you, I’ll kill them myself.”
“And how, exactly, are you going to take on a whole family of psychics?” I asked, aiming for a light, teasing tone and failing miserably.
Ali shrugged. “For you, I’d find a way, and technically, a group of psychics isn’t called a family.” Ali started walking toward the kitchen. “It’s called a coven.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THAT NIGHT, I SLATHERED MY SKIN WITH A THICK coat of aloe vera and slept with a fire extinguisher next to my bed. I might have been promised a seven-day cease-fire at lunch, but the psychics would have to forgive me if I was hesitant to take the word of a bunch of superpowered psychopaths who got their jollies from torturing teenage werewolves.
I think you’ll find us reasonable, Caroline had said.
“Yeah, right,” I muttered, turning over in bed. Despite the risks, I needed to get some rest. A sleep-deprived alpha was nobody’s friend.
Closing my eyes, I let my alpha-sense take over, reached out through the bond, and found the others. I let their thoughts and senses flood my own.
Alex. Lily. Katie. Mitch.
Devon, Maddy, Lake, and Chase.
The peripherals at the very edge of our territory. The rest of the kids at the Wayfarer.
We were safe. We were together. We were fine.
The dream started with Callum. He was standing in my old workshop—the one place in Stone River territory that I’d carved out as my own. Callum was watching something, a soft smile creasing a face that had never aged past thirty, relaxed, but leaking power all the same. I followed his gaze and saw myself standing there—a younger Bryn, though not by much, peeling dried glue off her fingertips as she stared with nearly comical concentration at the result of an afternoon’s work: a sculpture, maybe, or a mobile. What I was working on was fuzzy. It didn’t matter.
The look on Callum’s face did.
I couldn’t put words to the emotion, couldn’t describe it, except to say that during the course of my childhood, I’d caught him looking at me that way a hundred thousand times: like I was a puzzle, like I was precious.
Like he didn’t want me to grow up, because things would change forever once I did.
As if he could hear my thoughts, the dream Callum turned to look at me—the real me, not the memory of the girl I’d been a year or two before. He moved his lips, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t make out the words or the familiar tone of his low and steady voice.
I wanted to so badly it hurt.
He took my shoulders gently in his hands, bent down to my level. I opened my mouth but could not say a word. Everything began to go dark and fuzzy, but I held on, fought to hear what he was saying, wished he could look at me like I was little, like I was his—just one more time. But Callum faded away, to darkness, to nothing, leaving me staring at my younger self, this dream Bryn so caught up in things that didn’t matter. She turned, saw me. She pointed.
She smiled.
I glanced down to see what she was smiling at, and that was when I realized—I was bleeding. There were three deep wounds in my side, parallel lines.
The Mark.
I watched in horror as the gashes spread across my torso, leaving me unable to move until the sound of clapping broke me from my stupor. Young Bryn faded away, the way Callum had, and a new form took shape on my workbench.
Archer.
“Bravo,” he said. “Encore, encore! The angst. The drama. The symbolism. You’re first-class entertainment, little Bryn.”
Little Bryn should have sounded like an improvement over mutt-lover, but it didn’t.
“What?” The trespasser smiled sardonically. “No she-wolf this time?”
I found myself looking for her, even though I didn’t want to. The dreamworld shifted on its axis, the workshop giving way all around me to the forest, the snow. My body rebelled against the sudden change, nausea taking me down to my knees. The snow was wet and cold under my fingertips.
It melted under Archer’s feet.
So much for a cease-fire.
“Hey now,” he said, looming over me and sounding almost offended. “I’m not doing anything unsavory here. This is a dream of your making, not mine, wolf girl. I’m just along for the ride.”
Pain chipped away at my temple, like a metal pick striking ice. I fought my way through it, getting to my feet, fists clenched and thirsting for this psychic’s blood, but suddenly and without warning, I couldn’t breathe.
I looked down and realized with mounting horror that the gashes in my side were still growing—bigger and bigger—and they weren’t even bleeding anymore. I could see through them, all the way through my body and out the other side.
Beneath my skin, where there should have been fat and bone and muscle, there was nothing.
No organs. No blood.
I was hollow.
I woke with a start, and in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, my other senses flared to life. The room didn’t smell right. It didn’t feel right, and the scratching sound of inhuman nails against wooden floor told me that I wasn’t alone.
A silver knife was in my hand before I realized I had reached for it. I put my back to the wall and like a wild thing, I crouched slightly, holding my blade at the ready, right next to my ear.
The wolf at the foot of my bed backed up slowly. It took me a moment to recognize him, and a moment past that to push down the compulsion to throw the knife at the spot directly between his light brown eyes.
“Lucas?” I said, trying to process that he was there on my bedroom floor. He made no move to attack, and I returned the favor, but my fingers tightened around the hilt of the blade, ready to buy me whatever time they could.
In human form, Lucas was unassuming. Small. As a wolf, he was scraggly, with ribs poking out under matted fur and eyes that I could describe only as hungry.
“Change.” My voice shook slightly as I said the word, and I narrowed my eyes, allowing my own pack’s power to flow through me, banishing the kind of fear that the wolf in front of me might be able to smell. “Change, or I’ll call for the others, and we’ll hand you to the coven wrapped up in a little bow.”
At the word coven, the wolf went very still, and then I heard the first crack of bone. The shudder that went through Lucas’s body in the instant before the Change whetted my own appetite—for running, for hunting, for something—but I kept myself from moving, from approaching him.
I didn’t lower the knife.
By the time Lucas finished Changing, my own brow was covered with sweat, and my senses were heightened. My heart made itself known with uncompromising force beneath my rib cage, and my ears caught the muted sound of Lucas’s ragged breaths. He was hunched over on the floor, but he lifted his eyes to stare just over my left shoulder. The moonlight caught his irises.
He was naked.
Modesty warred with my survival instincts and lost. I knew better than to take my eyes off a predator, naked or not.
“I would never hurt you,” Lucas said, his voice breaking. “I needed … to run … I needed … to Shift.…” He shivered, eyeing the knife in my hands. “I needed …”
Me.
My mind finished the sentence for him, and I prayed he wouldn’t say it out loud.
“I needed to know,” Lucas said.
I breathed an internal sigh of relief that the naked boy on my floor hadn’t confessed his undying need for me.
“Yeah, well, I need you to cover yourself up.” I lowered the knife and reached across my body with my left hand to grab the blanket off my bed. I tossed it toward Lucas, and he caught it and did as I asked.
“I also need for you not to show up in my bedroom in the middle of the night.” I tried to put this in terms he could understand. “This is my territory. My personal territory, and no one comes here without an invitation.”
>
“I need to know.” Lucas was hunched over so far that his broken request was issued more to my feet than my face. “Are you going to hand me over?”
“I don’t know.” Now my voice was the one breaking. “I’m sorry, Lucas, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping there’s a way, I’m going to try to find a way, but if you’re asking if I’ll send my pack to war to keep you safe, when Shay could come in at any moment and demand you back, the answer is no. I can’t promise that, and you shouldn’t be asking me to.”
“There’s a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing,” a low, even voice said.
Chase.
I felt him before I saw him, and my body didn’t register even a hint of surprise at his presence. Of course he’d come. Of course he was moving to stand between Lucas and me.
“Lucas shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be asking you to do this. And he shouldn’t take it the wrong way that I’m going to give him until I count to three to put as much distance between the two of you as he possibly can.”
“Chase—”
Chase didn’t let me finish. “He should also be glad that I beat the others here, because I doubt Devon or Lake would be nearly as understanding about this as I am.”
Even in the scant moonlight, I could make out the way Chase’s pupils surged until his eyes were more black than blue. There was a part of him—a bigger part than I’d realized—that knew violence, the way he and I knew each other.
He was fighting it, and he was trying, but I could sense his human half wanting to hurl Lucas across the room every bit as much as his wolf wanted to sink fang into flesh.
“One.”
As the alpha, I could have made him stop, but I didn’t.
“Two.”
Lucas took off through the window, the same way he must have come in, and Chase followed him far enough to shut the pane carefully behind him, lock it. He let out a long, even breath.
“He didn’t hurt you.”
I got the feeling that Chase was talking to himself more than asking me a question.
“He didn’t hurt me,” I echoed. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to point out that I could take care of myself. Instead, I pried my fingers off the knife still clutched in my right hand and massaged my knuckles.
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