Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Lake wasn’t the kind of person you had to ask twice for weapons, so she didn’t even wait for her dad to give her a nod before she took off out the front door of the restaurant. I gave it ten-to-one odds that she’d be back with tranq guns in less than three minutes.

  Unfortunately, three minutes was all it took for Devon and Chase to show up at the restaurant and innocuously volunteer to shadow Ali and me on our trip to town. Given that the whole reason we were going into town was to flush out people who tortured werewolves for fun, I wasn’t inclined to indulge the boys’ protective instincts over my own.

  “I need you here,” I told Devon quietly. “Lucas showed up in my room last night.”

  I’d expected those words to distract Dev, but he just glanced at Chase and then turned back to me. “I know,” he said, and the similarity between my best friend’s facial expression and Chase’s was eerie.

  You told him? I asked Chase silently, torn between annoyance and shock. Chase and Devon weren’t exactly friends, and Chase wasn’t really what one would call chatty.

  “Of course he told me,” Devon retorted, even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t heard me ask the question. “You can just imagine how thrilled I was to hear it.”

  I wasn’t sure which was worse for Dev: that Lucas had gotten close enough to me that, if he’d wanted to, he could have ripped out my throat, or that Chase had been the one to stop him—and spend the night.

  “Dev, I need you and Lake to keep an eye on Lucas. Wherever he goes, you go, and if you can keep him away from the younger kids—”

  Devon’s eyes glittered. “You don’t even need to ask, milady.”

  The milady he tacked on to the end of that sentence was the only thing that reminded me that Dev wasn’t usually the type who lived life on the cusp of violence. All of us were on edge.

  And, Dev? I added. If you can keep him away from Maddy …

  I didn’t allow myself to finish that silent request. It didn’t seem right to ask Devon to keep Maddy from Lucas while the rest of our group roamed free. Maddy was a big girl, and if she wanted to stay close to Lucas, to watch him, to figure him out—I couldn’t keep her from it, any more than Callum had been able to keep Chase from me.

  I knew what it was like to look at someone and see yourself, to need answers, and as off balance as Lucas seemed, I had to remind myself that the day I’d met Chase, he’d snarled at me from inside a cage and told me that I smelled like meat.

  You don’t have to ask me to watch out for Maddy, Bryn. Devon met my eyes.  And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d have to ask Maddy to watch out for me.

  “Somebody ask for tranq guns?” Lake called, crossing the room in three long-legged strides, ponytail swinging. She handed one to Ali and one to me. “One dart will make a large male groggy or knock out a little bitty human girl.”

  I assumed from the tone of Lake’s voice that the “little bitty” comment referred to Caroline, and that Lake herself would have taken no small pleasure in pulling the trigger. She’d been taught all her life not to attack humans, but knock- ing them unconscious with tranquilizer guns was more of a gray area.

  “Thanks, Lake.” Accepting the gun from Lake, Ali turned back to me. “You ready to get out of here?”

  I nodded, and Chase echoed the motion. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he needed to stay here, but Ali shook her head slightly, and I let her speak instead.

  “How far away can you be and still sense Bryn?” Ali put the question to Chase and waited for his response. I figured that she was probably planning to tell him to hang back far enough that no one would see him, but close enough that I could call for him if things went bad. I realized a second after Ali asked the question that she probably wouldn’t like Chase’s answer.

  “I always sense her.” Chase shrugged, but despite the human gesture, I could tell that the answer was coming as much from the wolf as the boy. “Always feel her.”

  Ali held up one hand.

  “TMI?” I guessed.

  “Something like that,” she confirmed before turning her attention back to Chase. “If you can always sense her, you’ll know if she’s in trouble, and you’ll come. Otherwise, this is kind of a mother-daughter thing.”

  If there was one argument Chase couldn’t counter, it was that.

  “I’ll wait at the edge of our property,” he said, addressing the comment to me, like we were the only two people in the room—like the seven words he’d said to Ali and the heads-up he’d given Dev had tapped out his desire to speak to anyone but me. “You need me, I’m here.”

  That was what Chase did—whether he agreed with me or not, whether it was comfortable for him or not, he was always there.

  “I should go.” I forced my voice to sound normal and pressed back the desire to close my eyes and remember what it had felt like to wake up that morning with him by my side. “And hopefully, when we get back, we’ll have answers.”

  I didn’t bother to enumerate the questions; there were too many of them, and everyone in the room knew each one as well as I did. The only thing the others didn’t know was that Callum was the one who’d nudged Ali and me into doing recon on the psychics.

  Slipping the tranq gun into the inside pocket of my jacket, I couldn’t help wondering what exactly Callum had seen that had caused him to set us on this path.

  Time to find out.

  “So. You and Chase. How’s that going?”

  Apparently, this was Ali’s version of small talk. I immediately started wishing that the drive to town was a significantly shorter ordeal. Ali had me as a captive audience for at least another ten or fifteen minutes, and this was a conversation I’d been expertly avoiding for months.

  “So,” I returned evenly. “You and Mitch. How’s that going?”

  I knew that was a bit of a low blow, but I really didn’t want to try to explain to Ali, who’d done everything possible to make sure I had things in my life other than the pack, that as much as Chase and I were just getting to know each other on human terms, there was another part of me—the part that had been raised to think like a wolf—that had known him the second we met.

  “I’m not criticizing here, Bryn. I just want to make sure you’re careful.”

  For one horrific moment, I thought she might be on the verge of giving me a sex talk. Luckily, her next words laid that worry to rest.

  “Dating means something different to werewolves than it does to humans, and Chase hasn’t been one long enough to understand that, let alone control whatever his wolf feels when he’s close to you. You’re only sixteen, and wolves mate for life.”

  Casey hadn’t.

  I didn’t say the words, but the second I thought them, I felt like a horrible person. I was the one who’d torn Ali’s marriage apart in the first place. I would have preferred biting off a chunk of my own tongue to throwing that in her face.

  “I tried to make it work with Casey.”

  If I hadn’t already been silent, Ali voluntarily bringing up his name would have shocked me into it.

  “I wanted it to work, but it didn’t, because Casey’s not human, and no matter how much he thought he loved me, there were always going to be things that mattered more.”

  I wanted to point out that unlike Casey, whose loyalties had and would always lie with Callum, Chase would never have to choose between his alpha and me. I was his alpha. But Ali wasn’t done talking yet, and I didn’t interrupt her.

  “You’ve seen the way Casey is when he visits, the way he still looks at me, the way he acts when Mitch and I are even in the same room.” Ali very deliberately did not elaborate on whether or not Casey had anything to be jealous about. “Whatever I had with Casey is over for me, Bryn, but for as long as I live, it won’t ever be over for Casey, and I have to deal with that. I’m a big girl. I can do it, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you have no way of knowing what you’ll want five years from now, or ten. Maybe Chase is the one. Maybe he isn’t. But
if you let things get intense now, there won’t ever be someone else for him, and you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”

  I was beginning to suspect that I would have preferred Ali giving me the sex talk.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Ali. Chase isn’t like other Weres. He’s not possessive. He doesn’t expect me to bow down to anyone.”

  She looked less than convinced.

  “And besides,” I added, “as intense as things are, I have an entire pack inside my head. If it were just him and me, then maybe things would be going too fast, but they’re not.” I glanced out the window, unsure whether I wanted to say the next part out loud. “Before I was alpha, it was like the two of us were the only people in the world, and now we’re not.”

  Ali had the good grace not to look too relieved. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Bryn.”

  “I know. And I wouldn’t trade the pack, not for anything.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looped it over into a loose bun. “Chase wouldn’t ask me to—but seeing Lucas, hearing about everything he’s gone through, it makes me realize: I think I know more about Lucas’s past than I know about Chase’s.”

  Maybe if it had been just Chase and me, we would have talked about his human life more, the way we did in the beginning, but the quiet moments, the ones where the rest of the pack just faded away, were so few and far between.

  “People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn.” Ali’s tone was mild, but the words felt like a reproach. “Even from you.”

  Ali looked like she was about to say something else, but instead, she killed the engine, and I realized we had made it to town.

  Thank God.

  I’d take a physical fight over Touchy-Feely Share Time, hands down. Hopefully, though, this wouldn’t come to an actual fight.

  Assuming Ali’s intuitions about the coven were right, once we started making our way down Main Street, our targets would come to us. Based on my previous interactions with Archer and Caroline, it seemed likely that they’d stick to the armistice Caroline had promised—but just barely. If they could get under my skin, mess with my mind, they would.

  And then some.

  As far as I was concerned, they could try, but I had no intention of letting myself be intimidated. Once they made the first move, I’d know how to counter. Whatever mind games they tried to play would tell me more about who they were and how they operated.

  The Callum I knew wouldn’t have sent me here otherwise. I hadn’t seen him in months, hadn’t heard from him, but I trusted that.

  Game on.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A LIFETIME OF BEING TAUGHT TO WATCH MY BACK made it hard for me to stroll down Main Street without thinking about all the ways I was leaving myself open for an attack. Growing up with people who could turn you into an afternoon snack had a way of giving you an unusual perspective on playing bait. I’d done it before—once—and the effort had ended with me knocked unconscious and tied to a chair in the home of a Rabid serial killer who liked to dress girls up in their Sunday best before making them bleed.

  Suffice to say, I was hoping for a better outcome this time—especially since I didn’t have werewolf backup waiting just around the bend.

  “Mind games,” Ali reminded me, her voice muted. “They’re all about the mind games.”

  I was about to ask her why every time she made a statement about psychics, she sounded as straightforward and certain as Lake would have sounded talking about guns, but just as my mouth was about to form the words, I felt something—eyes on the back of my head, a presence cast over me like a shadow.

  Step. Step. Step.

  The sound of feet treading lightly on concrete was unmistakable—soft, but perceptible to human ears. I glanced at Ali out of the corner of my eye, and she gave a slight nod. She heard it, too.

  Step. Step. Step.

  And then nothing.

  I knew enough about hunting to know when I was being stalked. I also knew, with chilling certainty, that the silence wasn’t an indication that the person tailing us had dropped back. She’d wanted us to know she was there, and now she wanted us to know that she could disappear from our radar, that unless she willed it, we would never hear her coming at all.

  Caroline.

  I kept myself from whirling around. If there was one thing I’d had pounded into my head from day one, it was the necessity of never letting fear show in my posture, the speed of my breath, the weight of my motions.

  If this girl wanted to play mind games, I could play them right back.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?” I asked, voice casual, eyes pointed straight ahead.

  “Hello.” Caroline spoke the word directly into my back. She was closer than I’d realized—too close—but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of reacting.

  “Playing hooky?” I asked, forcing myself to continue facing forward, sending the message, loud and clear, that she wasn’t a threat worth facing head-on.

  “Mental health day,” Caroline replied, her tone light, but lethal. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. You?”

  I didn’t hear her shifting positions, didn’t catch even the slightest sound as she unsheathed a blade, but somehow—instinct, maybe, or my knack—I knew. I reached back and caught her hand seconds before she would have pressed the flat of her knife to my back, just to prove that she could.

  “You should stick to throwing knives,” I said, tightening my grip and forcing the bones in her wrist together as I jerked upward and spun, bringing myself face-to-face with the blonde with the dead, dead eyes. “Perfect aim doesn’t really help you in hand-to-hand.”

  For a moment, the potential for bloodshed—hers, mine—hung in the air between us, and the part of me that was alpha, the part that had grown up like a Were, wanted it. The coven had come here to my territory and threatened my pack. One of their females had come at me from behind.

  That wasn’t the kind of thing I was wired to take sitting down.

  “Bryn.” Ali’s voice was mild, but I nodded and dropped Caroline’s gloved wrist. We hadn’t come here to fight. We’d come for information, and so far, we hadn’t gotten much. In fact, the only thing I knew now that I hadn’t known before this little melodrama had gone down was that I could take the coven’s pint-sized emissary in hand-to-hand—but if she’d had a weapon trained on me from afar …

  “I’m Ali.” In a surprisingly gentle voice, my foster mother introduced herself to the girl who’d pulled a knife on me.

  “Caroline,” the girl said shortly.

  There was a moment of silence while the two of them appraised each other. Ali had several inches and sixteen years on Caroline, but for a split second, the two seemed disturbingly well matched.

  “We didn’t know the wolf girl had human friends,” Caroline said.

  Ali shrugged. “I didn’t know your coven was on good enough terms with the people in town to risk pulling a knife on someone in broad daylight—unless, of course, you have someone running interference, showing them something else.”

  Caroline blinked once when Ali said the word coven and once when my foster mother called that Caroline probably hadn’t come here alone. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that if Archer could enter my dreams, the coven might have someone who could make the rest of the people in town think they were seeing something they weren’t.

  “You have no idea what you’re up against,” Caroline said, and for a second—a single second—she sounded almost sad. “Don’t tell me the two of you would die for one of them. Don’t tell me they’re worth it. They’re monsters, and you know that, same as me.”

  A reply was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could press Caroline to tell me how she could call my pack monsters, given what her coven had done to a battered teenage boy, a single note, haunting and low, made its way to my ears, and suddenly, whatever I was going to say didn’t seem nearly so important.

  Caroline turning and walking away didn�
��t seem important.

  Nothing did.

  Objectively, I knew that another person might describe the sound as a whistle, compare it to the product of blowing a steady stream of air into a hand-carved woodwind. But to me, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a song.

  It was paralyzing.

  I knew what was happening, knew that there was a person making this sound, and that when she’d made it for Lucas, he hadn’t been able to move or scream or even care that he was being tortured.

  I knew, I knew, I knew—and I didn’t care.

  My hands fell to my sides. My lips parted slightly, the tension evaporating from my face and jaw. All my other senses receded, because nothing mattered as much as the sound.

  The sound.

  On some level, I realized that Ali had gone still beside me, her muscles as liquid and useless as mine. I saw people approaching, recognized Archer, noted the old woman standing beside him, looking every inch the storybook grandmother but for the snake coiled like a scarf around her neck. And then there was the third in their little trio, the one whistling that one-note song that snaked its way through my brain, around my limbs, in and out of my blood, my skin, everything.

  Archer and the old woman closed in on me from either side, the snake slithering from Grandma’s neck down her shoulder, poised to strike.

  For a second, a split second, the sound stopped as the woman who was whistling took a breath, and I had a moment of clarity, a moment when I could think and move and realize exactly how bad this situation was, before the sound started again.

  A feeling, alien and familiar all at once, crackled through my body. The sound pushed back against it, willing me to relax, to forget, to just stand there and let the psychics have their way with me, but this time, I heard a lower sound, an older one, a whisper from the most ancient part of my mind, from my gut, from the core of what it meant to be me.

  Threat, threat, threat, it seemed to be saying. Survive.

  My body was relaxed, my limbs frozen in place, but that single word was enough to free my mind. My vision blurred. Darkness began to close in from all sides, and even before I saw red, I tasted it, the color tinny and electric on my tongue.