Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Chase’s eyes faded back to their natural blue, and he crossed the room. He ran one hand over my arm and nodded, as if to convince himself that I was fine, that Lucas hadn’t hurt me—even though he could have.

  “Bryn?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Chase nodded, breathed in my scent.

  “He’s broken,” I said. “The look on his face, it was just …”

  “I know,” Chase said. “Trust me, Bryn. I—of all people—know.”

  “But,” I prompted, sensing he had more to say.

  “I know what he’s been through and I’m sorry for it, but I don’t trust him.”

  I didn’t trust Lucas, either—not by a long shot. He was too unpredictable; he held things back from us too often, too much. But even though I didn’t trust Lucas, I knew what it was like to be broken, to have to fight through it and find a way to put yourself and your life back together.

  And so did Chase.

  That was why I needed to do something—because once upon a time, another alpha had done something for me.

  “You wanted me to go and talk to Lucas, to form my own impressions, and I did,” Chase said, pulling my mind back to the present. “Lucas is desperate. Desperate people do desperate things, Bryn.”

  I heard him. I believed him—but I couldn’t wash my hands of this, no matter how much Chase wanted me to. I couldn’t let Lucas down just to take care of myself.

  Chase pressed his lips to my temple, and I felt their touch through my whole body.

  Your job is watching out for the pack, he’d told me. Let my job be watching out for you.

  His lips traveled from my temple down to my mouth, his arms pulling me closer—and for a few moments, when it was just the two of us and I could feel him everywhere, it didn’t matter that I was alpha, didn’t matter that he wanted things for me that I would never be able to have.

  I didn’t think about Lucas or the coven or the million and one ways this situation could end badly for everyone involved.

  All I thought about was us. Chase and Bryn. Bryn and Chase.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHASE SPENT THE NIGHT, AND I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning with my head on his chest and his body curved around mine, like he could ward off the outside world by wrapping my frame in his. I listened to his heart beating in his chest, and burrowed in closer, surrounding myself with the warmth of his body, the scent of his skin.

  This was right. This was safe. This had kept the nightmares away.

  And then I heard the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. My first thought was that Lucas was back. My second was that the coven, unable to send Archer into my dreams, had come to try out their intimidation factor in person. My third thought was the most logical—and the most terrifying.

  Ali.

  I flipped over onto my side and looked at the digital clock on my nightstand. 10:23.

  “Chase.” I kept the volume of my voice low but made up for it by shoving him in the ribs.

  “Bryn,” he said, his eyes still closed, a loopy smile on his face.

  “Get up.”

  He must have sensed the urgency in my tone, because the next second, the smile was gone and there was something feral and hard in its place. He moved quickly, pushing me back toward the headboard, crouching in front of me.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Not that kind of danger, Chase, I told him silently. You’re a boy. In my bed. And Ali doesn’t believe in sleeping past ten thirty. Ever. It’s a miracle she didn’t drag me out of bed to get ready for school.

  In the madness of the day before, I hadn’t gotten around to dropping the “no more high school” bombshell. Luckily, Ali seemed to know that there was no margin for error in our current predicament—and no way that any of us should give the psychics an opportunity to divide and conquer.

  Still, impending disaster or no impending disaster, the twins had undoubtedly been up for hours, and Ali was probably on the verge of venturing into my bedroom. She was already uncomfortable with the intensity of my relationship with Chase. Somehow, I doubted her finding him in my bed would help matters, even if we did have the mother of all excuses.

  You have to leave, I told Chase. Now.

  He twisted to face me, his posture relaxing, the light, playful smile returning to his face. I was used to the give-and-take between the boy and the wolf inside, but I was still struck by the combined effect of his bed-head and our current situation. For the first time since he’d come back from patrol, Chase seemed like he belonged here, body and mind—not just with me, but at the Wayfarer. Like this was home.

  I should go, Bryn.

  His voice was a whisper in my mind, and I wondered if I’d projected my thoughts to him—if home, like Thanksgiving, was something he’d thought of only in the abstract. Without saying another word to me, silently or out loud, Chase slid off the bed and began walking toward the window, and every instinct in my body said to follow.

  Then there was a tentative knock on my bedroom door, and every instinct I had said to cover.

  “Just a second!” I called. Ali opened the door, just a crack. Once she had ascertained that I was not, in fact, naked, she pushed it the rest of the way open and came in.

  I had never in my life been so grateful for werewolf speed. Chase was gone before Ali’s eyes had a chance to register that he’d ever been there. Unfortunately, Ali had the uncanny ability to look at me and know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was hiding something.

  “Sleep well?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  I had two choices: evade the question and pique her curiosity enough that she’d keep digging around until she figured out what was setting off her mom sense, or distract her with the least damning portion of the truth.

  “I slept well this morning, but last night was rough.”

  “Was it?” Ali asked, glancing around my room and noting the blanket that Lucas had left on my floor.

  “Lucas came by,” I said. She would have found out eventually anyway; this wasn’t the kind of thing I could hide from the pack, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ignore. Wanting to help Lucas and giving him free rein of our territory were two different things, and I couldn’t help that Chase’s words had dug their way into my mind. Lucas was a loose cannon. Desperate people did desperate things, and desperate werewolves were a thousand times worse.

  Especially when they showed up in your bedroom alone at night.

  “I know he’s scared,” I said, “and it’s not like I’ve been able to give him an answer, but …”

  “But he broke into a foreign alpha’s house and could have killed you in your sleep?” Ali was taking this about as well as could be expected—which is to say, not well at all. “Most alphas would kill him. Callum would cage him.”

  I knew exactly what Ali thought about the werewolf version of justice. She was the voice in my head telling me that violence—that kind of violence—was never okay.

  I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “I’m leaning more towards asking Devon and Lake to shadow his every move.”

  Between Lake’s trigger finger and Devon’s fondness for show tunes, that seemed like a harsh enough incentive to walk the straight and narrow to me.

  “Seems reasonable,” Ali agreed, “but it might not be a bad idea for you to take on a shadow yourself.”

  Ali judiciously avoided meeting my gaze as she said those words. In the entire history of my life, I’d never once willingly agreed to lupine bodyguards—not that my agreement had ever been necessary before. In Callum’s pack, my refusal had been cause for amusement more than anything else, but now the decision was mine.

  “I need you to do this for me,” Ali said, and I knew by her tone that it wasn’t a request.

  Correction, I thought, the decision is technically mine.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll have Devon, Lake, Maddy, and Chase rotate through: half on me, half on Lucas, anytime I’m on the property.”

  “Y
ou planning on leaving sometime soon?” Ali asked. I’d expected her to pick up on that, but I’d also expected her to be adamantly against it. Instead, her voice was guarded, like she knew something I didn’t.

  Maybe multiple somethings.

  “I don’t know what I’m planning on doing,” I said honestly. “But I’m getting the distinct feeling that you do.”

  Ali pressed her lips together for a moment and then she spoke. “I called Callum this morning.”

  Like mother, like daughter—Callum was never far from my mind and never far from hers. The difference was that I’d come to terms with the things Callum had done to set me on the path to becoming the Cedar Ridge alpha, and Ali probably never would. She’d loved Callum, the same way I had, but she’d never cared that he was the alpha. She’d fought him—and me—every time I’d started thinking and acting more Were than human.

  He’d promised her once that she’d have the final word on my safety, and in Ali’s eyes, he’d broken that promise and then some.

  “You called Callum?” I asked, watching a bevy of emotions and vulnerability flash across her face until she pressed back against them.

  “I was worried, and in his own way, he … cares … about you.”

  I thought about the Callum in my dream—mute and hovering just out of reach. “Did Callum actually answer the phone, or did he have Sora do it?”

  Ali gave me a strange look. “He answered. Why?”

  “No reason. Is he the one who told you I needed guards?”

  Ali shrugged. “I believe his exact words were ‘If she was living in my territory, I’d have half my pack watching her back.’ ”

  Even from a distance, Callum was still controlling parts of my life. The fact that he couldn’t be bothered to answer my phone calls was just salt in the wound.

  I didn’t bother to bite back the sarcasm in my reply to Ali. “Did he round out the conversation by giving you cryptic warnings or promising to send you presents with some kind of secret meaning that you absolutely and without question won’t understand?”

  “No,” Ali said, dragging the word out and tilting her head to the side. She waited to see if I would elaborate, and when I didn’t, she did. “He did say that it was best if the two of you had no direct contact for the time being, and that he couldn’t advise me on how this should be handled or things could go very badly.”

  “What a drama queen,” I muttered, eliciting an incredulous laugh from Ali. “I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen if he helps me out here? The apocalypse?”

  “A high probability of civil war,” Ali corrected. “Or so says the drama queen.”

  I just loved it when my worst-case scenario went from bad to horrific. The precarious democracy in the werewolf Senate was a stick of dynamite, waiting to go off. I had no desire to be the one to strike the match.

  “So in summation, his only suggestion was putting half the pack on Bryn Babysitting Duty, and he can’t do anything to help us directly without inciting a chain of events that might lead to a future he doesn’t want.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Ali said in a voice that suggested it wasn’t much consolation to her, “I think the part of him that’s actually human wishes that he could help. It’s just not a very big part. Not anymore.”

  I wasn’t about to touch Ali’s Callum issues with a ten-foot pole. “In other not-helpful news,” I told her, “I got a visit from one of the psychics again last night.”

  Ali’s entire body went tense. “And you didn’t lead with that?” she asked tersely. “Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

  In retrospect, I had to consider the possibility that telling Ali this was a mistake. For whatever reason, psychics were a sore spot with her. I should have known she wouldn’t take the idea of a nighttime invasion lying down.

  “I’m fine. One of them just has a nasty habit of showing up in my dreams. At least this time, he came alone.”

  “What did he look like?” Ali enunciated each of the words, and I could tell she was fighting to keep her voice from rising in pitch.

  “Dark hair. Early twenties. Penchant for sarcasm.”

  That wasn’t exactly a quality description, but at the time, I’d been too busy wanting to kill the guy to take note of his features. Still, the description seemed to satisfy Ali and she let out a breath that I hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “Early twenties,” she repeated.

  “College aged,” I confirmed. “Maybe a little older, but not much.” I hesitated a fraction of a second but then had to ask: “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ali said. “I’m fine. You should be, too. Entering other people’s dreams isn’t all that different from what people with open pack-bonds can do with each other, and the psychic doing it can’t hurt you. He can annoy you. He can frighten you. But that’s it.”

  I decided, for the time being, not to mention that the psychic in question appeared to be able to cross that line with relatively little effort.

  “You seem to know a lot about psychics.” I let that statement hang in the air, but Ali didn’t offer up an explanation, leaving me to wonder if I wasn’t the only one dancing around full disclosure.

  “I don’t know enough,” Ali said instead, “and neither do you. I told Callum as much.”

  “And …?” I knew by the look on Ali’s face that there was more.

  “And,” Ali continued, “he said that it was absolutely crucial for me to tell you that if you go anywhere near this coven, he’d be very displeased. I believe his exact words were that you shouldn’t be poking your nose around their affairs and that he forbids it.”

  Forbids it?

  Forbids it?

  I sputtered, “Who does he think he is? I’m not his responsibility, and he’s not my alpha. He can’t forbid anything.”

  Even when I had been living under Callum’s rule, even when he’d been the closest thing to family that Ali and I had, I’d never have let him get away with being that high-handed. Forbidding me to do something was as good as telling me to do it.

  Irritation mounted until I felt like snarling. Slowly, however, common sense intruded on my ire, and a little bell began going off in the back of my head.

  Callum knew that telling me specifically not to do something was a surefire recipe for making me want to do it.

  He knew that.

  I glanced at Ali to see if she was thinking the same thing. The edges of her lips turned upward. “Callum’s many things, Bryn, but he isn’t an idiot. The only reason he’d ever ask me to tell you that something was strictly, absolutely off-limits was if he wanted to ensure that you’d do the exact opposite of what you were told.”

  When it came to maneuvering around the rules, I’d learned from the master. If the Senate asked, Callum could honestly say that other than telling Ali to keep me at home and under guard, he’d done nothing. He hadn’t offered us any advice in his position as alpha, and he most certainly hadn’t suggested that if I wanted to find my way out of this situation, I’d need to investigate the coven firsthand.

  “Think if I go into town alone, someone will show up to play more mind games?” I asked.

  “Most psychics don’t have aggressive powers.” Ali glanced out the window. “For every person who’s good in a fight, there are twelve who are better at messing with your mind. Even if this coven is one of the more powerful ones, if you show up in town without a werewolf escort, someone will show.”

  I was shocked that Ali was willing to consider the idea of me playing bait—until I realized that she hadn’t specified my going into town alone. She’d said that someone was sure to show if I went in without werewolf backup. Given that she and I were the only humans in the pack, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was planning on coming with me.

  Knowing Ali the way I did, though, I was starting to suspect that it was more than that. Ali wasn’t just planning on coming with me—she seemed dead set on it, like she wanted to flush out the psychics as much
as or more than I did. I could see the drive to do this hidden beneath the almost-neutral set of her features.

  Ali didn’t just want to come with me. She needed to come with me. The only thing that wasn’t 100 percent clear to me was why.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALI AND I STOPPED BY THE RESTAURANT ON OUR way to town. Living with werewolves meant that everyone would know the second we left the Wayfarer grounds anyway, so there was no point in sneaking around. Besides, Ali needed to drop the twins off with Mitch and check in with the older Resilients to make sure the younger ones were doing okay. There weren’t too many kids in our pack young enough to need constant supervision, but the older Resilients—some of whom were just a few years younger than me—had been taking care of the littler kids for years.

  In the clutches of the Rabid, they’d been the ones to bear the brunt of the abuse.

  If there was one thing that seeing Lucas had taught me, it was how lucky they all were to have come out of it with their minds and spirits intact.

  “Where’d you say you’re going again?” Mitch asked. His voice was mild, but he was a Were and Ali was female, so the things he didn’t say hung in the air between them, heavy and clear.

  “We’re going to town,” Ali repeated, unfazed by the question and the manner in which it was delivered. “Just for an hour or so. Think you can hold things down here?”

  “I suspect I can.” Mitch paused for a split second and then he turned to me and said, “Bryn, I ever tell you that you and Ali here are an awful lot alike?”

  Ali couldn’t seem to decide whether to smile or throw her hands up in the air at that, so I saved her the trouble of responding.

  “I’m going to assume that’s a compliment,” I told Mitch. “For both of us.”

  Mitch shook his head in consternation, and Ali reached up and patted his shoulder, in a motion that I was fairly certain she didn’t mean to look nearly as intimate as it did. “We’ll be fine, Mitch. If it’ll make you feel better, have Lake rustle up a couple of tranquilizer guns. Just make sure they’re loaded for humans, not Weres.”