Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  This was what it meant to be Resilient. The taste, the color, the rush of adrenaline into my bloodstream. The fury and power and uncompromising need to escape. To fight back.

  To survive.

  Instinct took over. One second I was standing there, and the next, the roar inside me was deafening, drowning out anything my external senses had to offer. I leapt forward, the world colored in shades of black and blood, blood-red, and by the time I came fully back into myself, the sound had stopped, and everyone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Ali was on the ground.

  I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there, or what I’d done, but whatever it was must have sent a message, because as they climbed to their feet, the woman who’d been whistling kept her mouth closed, and the other two kept their distance.

  “Easy there, mutt-lover. If we wanted to fight, you’d be dead right now.” Archer gave me a genial smile. Like he knew me. Like we were friends. “I’m not much of a fighter, but even I could have slid a knife between your ribs in the time it took you to fight off Bridget’s hold.”

  Having said his piece, Archer glanced pointedly to his left, at the old woman, who was stroking her snake’s triangular head like it was a kitten. The suggestion was clear—if Grandma had wanted me dead, her pet could have seen to that just fine.

  “You should know what you’re up against.” Bridget’s speaking voice was absurdly plain compared to the sound she’d made before. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me, but the note of kindness in it did. “If we fight you, really fight you, there will be casualties on both sides, but we will win. Your people will fall, some of them”—she glanced at Ali—“without ever realizing there’s a battle they should be fighting.”

  Bridget’s warning sank in.

  Being Resilient meant being resistant to dominance and having a knack for escaping even the direst situations. If I could fight my way through Bridget’s hypnotic hold, chances were good that Chase, Maddy, and the other Resilients could do the same.

  Eventually.

  I tried not to think about what the rest of Bridget’s coven could do in the time it took us to combat her ability. I tried not to think about the fact that Ali, Mitch, Devon, and Lake might not be able to fight it in the first place.

  Lucas hadn’t.

  “You’ve seen Caroline,” Bridget continued softly. “You know what she can do.”

  Darkness flecked across Bridget’s eyes when she said Caroline’s name. Fear, thick and uncompromising, with a life of its own.

  For a moment, the same expression descended over the others’ faces, like Caroline was their bogeyman as much as she was ours.

  Archer recovered first. “This shouldn’t be your fight, Bryn,” he said softly. “Sometimes, backing down is the right choice. The smart one.” Archer reached out to tweak the end of my hair, but Ali caught his hand in hers.

  “You don’t talk to my daughter,” she said. “You talk to me.” She looked from Archer to Bridget to the old woman cooing at the snake. “Is this how your coven operates? You send a child out to issue your threats? You torture teenagers and play mind games with little girls?”

  I hadn’t been a little girl in a very long time, but Ali on a rampage was a thing to behold, and far be it from me to interrupt.

  “You make me sick.” Ali spat out the words, and Archer faltered, his smile replaced by something uncertain, some measure of loathing for himself and what he was doing, but as quickly as the emotion had come, something else replaced it.

  Anger.

  Bloodthirstiness.

  Disgust.

  The same expression overtook the whistler’s face and the old lady’s, as potent as the fear they’d shown at Caroline’s name. The emotions writhed beneath the surface of their flesh, so vivid it looked like it might at any moment take on a life—and an agenda—of its own.

  “Did Lucas do something to you?” I asked, floored by the depth of their hatred, but unable to keep the doubt that Lucas was actually capable of doing anything more than annoying them out of my tone.

  “He’s a werewolf,” Archer said finally, his voice venomous, but somehow dull. “They’re animals—all of them.”

  The woman with the snake shook her head. “Not natural,” she murmured. “Not animals. Worse.”

  I bristled. Nobody knew better than I did what a werewolf could do, if he chose to cross that line. I’d spent my entire childhood aware that my life could have been forfeited the minute any one of them lost control. If Callum hadn’t made my safety a matter of Pack Law, I might not have survived to adolescence, and I still dreamed about the sound human flesh made when canines tore it apart.

  But that kind of werewolf was the exception, not the rule. Alphas didn’t allow their wolves to run wild. We killed our own if they hunted humans. We weren’t—my family and friends, they weren’t monsters.

  Werewolves were people, too.

  “You’ve had a run-in with a Rabid,” Ali said, judging their reactions. “Your coven has lost someone.”

  Her words were met with steely silence, and I braced myself for another attack as Ali kept pushing at it, kept pushing them.

  “He or she must have been very important. You must have loved whoever it was very much.”

  Bridget quivered like a rabbit facing off against a fox and then snapped. Her hand connected with Ali’s cheek with a loud crack. I was already in motion, retaliating, when Ali smiled. She’d gotten a rise out of them, and for whatever reason, she was happy about it.

  Trust me, Bryn. It’s a good thing. That was the first time I’d ever heard Ali through the bond she shared with my pack, and I went into a state of immediate shock, stopping all onslaught. Being human allowed Ali to keep her bond shut, the way I had for most of my life in Callum’s pack. That she’d opened it, even for a second, told me it was crucial that I keep calm and let her continue playing her current game.

  “You must have loved him,” Ali repeated. “Whoever it was that you lost. It makes me wonder, though—if a werewolf did that to someone you loved, if you hate their kind so much, why would you trust one to give you a gift? Why make a deal with the devil?”

  Ali’s words didn’t permeate the loathing the trio wore on their faces, as permanent and striking as some kind of tattoo, but I registered their meaning instantly.

  Shay had sent Lucas to the coven.

  Lucas had said it was part of some kind of deal.

  So what had the coven given Shay in exchange? And why would they have agreed to give him anything in the first place?

  “We should probably be heading home,” Ali said, tucking a strand of my hair behind my shoulder, in a maternal gesture that would have been a lot more appropriate if the two of us had been out shopping. “We’ve been standing here awhile, and unless one of you is still actively blocking it, I think we’ve probably put on enough of a show for the rest of the town, don’t you?”

  I glanced around and realized that more than one shop owner was watching our exchange with feigned disinterest, and a couple of people were gawking in a way that suggested they might have seen me lash out and put the newcomers on the ground.

  In retrospect, it was probably a very good thing that I’d already decided to withdraw from the local high school.

  “Nice meeting you all,” Ali said in a tone that suggested it was anything but.

  Archer was the one to reply, and despite Ali’s warning, he directed the words at me, not her.

  “Six days.”

  I turned. Ali turned. We walked back to the car in silence. I knew what we were up against now, better than I had before, knew at least part of what they had in their arsenal. I’d marked the way they looked at and interacted with each other. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they considered Caroline to be the biggest threat.

  I climbed into the car. Ali climbed into the car. We shut our doors.

  If anything, this recon mission had assured me that my earlier assumptions were correct. If we fought the coven, there would
be bloodshed, and a large portion of it would be ours. If we gave in to their demands and let them have Lucas, he would be better off dead.

  Six days.

  I had less than a week to decide between two evils. Less than a week to find out what kind of deal the coven had made with Shay.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE RIDE BACK TO THE WAYFARER WAS SIGNIFIcantly quieter than the ride out. Ali seemed calmer somehow, like the interaction, which had sent a rush of adrenaline surging through my veins, had sedated whatever worries she’d been holding on to all day.

  Instead of thinking about Shay, or the coven, or the partly unhinged werewolf waiting for me to save him from both of the above, I thought about Ali and the way she was handling all of this. We’d been hypnotized. A natural hunter had pulled a knife on me. Violence had been promised and there was every indication that this group, family, coven, whatever could deliver.

  Ali was taking it in stride.

  She’d pushed them and prodded them and borne their presence in her mind without so much as blinking. She hadn’t shown any sign of weakness, any sign of fear.

  Any surprise.

  People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn. Even from you.

  The words Ali had said in our conversation about Chase came back to me with a vengeance. Ali was handling this well—too well—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was keeping secrets from me, the same way she’d never bothered to mention that Callum could see the future.

  The same way I hadn’t told her when I went off to hunt the Rabid.

  The same way I probably wasn’t going to tell her that I already had plans to go on a second recon mission. Alone.

  The coven had a deal with Shay. I needed to know what it was, and I wasn’t going to find out by letting my foster mother ask the questions. For whatever reason, she knew psychics, but I knew alphas, and I couldn’t imagine Shay giving Lucas to the coven without asking for something in return.

  I also couldn’t imagine that the werewolf Senate would be happy to find out that one of the pack alphas had made some kind of alliance with a group of werewolf-hating humans. Once I found out what the deal was, once I had proof, I might actually have something to hold over Shay’s head. And if I had the backing of the Senate, I might be able to convince the coven to back off.

  “What are you thinking?” Ali asked. After ten minutes of silence, I was surprised to hear her voice.

  “I’m thinking about secrets.” I leaned the side of my head against the window and watched the mounds of snow pass by as we drove. “Yours. Mine.”

  “If you want to know something, Bryn, just ask.”

  People were allowed to have secrets. Being alpha didn’t mean I had to know everything—I didn’t need to know how Ali felt about Mitch, or what she was planning to do about Casey, or why she would never consent to running with the pack.

  But I needed to know everything I could about psychics, so I had to ask. “You handled that well.”

  “That wasn’t a question,” Ali commented, her tone completely neutral.

  “You knew what to expect. You knew how to read them. And I can’t shake the feeling that you got more answers out of that little exchange than I did. Am I wrong?”

  “No.” Ali pulled the car over to the side of the road and slid the gearshift into park. She left the key in the ignition and the heat blasting, but unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face me. “Did you see the look in their eyes whenever they talked about werewolves?”

  Hatred, undiluted and pure. “Hard to miss,” I said.

  Ali inclined her head slightly. “Did you happen to notice the size of their pupils?”

  I was used to watching Weres’ eyes for hints of the Change, so it only took me a second to walk my way back through the scene and pinpoint the moment Ali had referenced.

  “Their pupils got bigger.”

  “And when do humans’ pupils dilate?” Ali asked me.

  How was I supposed to know? I couldn’t even diagnose the full meaning of eyelash batting.

  “A human’s pupils dilate when they walk into a dark room, when they’re attracted to someone, or when they’re under some form of external psychic influence.” Ali paused, and I saw her weighing her next words very carefully. “I spent most of my childhood with dilated pupils.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think Ali was suggesting that she’d spent her formative years in the dark.

  “It’s not the kind of thing most people notice—at least, not at first. Most knacks, to use your expression, are like Keely’s—subtle enough that even if you know what to look for, you don’t realize what’s happening. It’s like … Imagine that for every natural ability in the world, there’s a spectrum, and on one side of the spectrum, you have all of the people who are really bad at that thing, and on the other side, you have all of the people who are really good at it. And occasionally, once every ten million or fifty million or however many people, you’ll get someone who’s really good at it.”

  I nodded, afraid that if I said a word, she’d stop talking and wouldn’t start again.

  “My mother was like that, with emotions. She always knew what everyone was feeling, and whenever she smiled, it made you want to smile, too. If she was sad, I was sad. If she was angry, I was angry. I loved her so much, because she was my mother, and because she wanted me to.”

  Ali’s eyes were completely dry, but mine were stinging, because I knew already that this story wasn’t going to end well. Ali had cut off contact with her human family to join Callum’s pack and take care of me. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that she might have had other reasons for leaving her old life behind.

  “When I was six, a group of people came through town, and one of them realized what my mother could do. They told her she was special. They offered to train her. They took us in.”

  I digested that information. “You grew up in a coven?”

  Ali nodded. “Until I was twelve.”

  I tried to process, but couldn’t keep up with her words.

  “There were twenty or thirty of us, lots of children, and everybody fell at that far end of the spectrum—the gifted end—except for me. It would have been hard, growing up with other people poking around in my dreams and my head, sneaking up on me, playing cat and mouse with me even when I didn’t want to play, but my mother wanted me to be happy, so I was happy.”

  Suddenly, I could understand why Ali had always kept her pack-bonds closed. Why she’d never let the others in, never risked losing herself to the pack mentality and—up until I’d broken with Callum’s pack—encouraged me to do the same.

  “We used to move around a lot. One person with a knack is subtle. A couple dozen aren’t, and one day, when I was twelve, we’d been staying at an RV camp near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, and I went out to run an errand someone had told me to run. When I came back, everyone else was gone. It took a couple of days for my head to clear. I used to get these headaches, and these nosebleeds, and I remember looking in the mirror at social services and seeing my pupils, and they were small enough that you could tell that my eyes were hazel and not just brown.

  “I don’t think I’d ever actually seen my eyes look like that before. I was twelve years old, and that was the first time I could ever remember being able to feel something just because it was the way I felt. I went through eight foster homes in six years, then I went to college, and one of the girls I’d kept in touch with from one of the group homes disappeared. The rest of the story, you know.”

  “You went looking for the girl and found a pack of werewolves,” I said.

  “And the pack’s alpha had just taken in a little girl, a human girl, and he told me that she’d need somebody to take care of her, because the rest of the pack would always be bigger, and they’d always be stronger, and she’d be alone.”

  To someone who’d grown up as the only normal kid in a coven of psychics, Callum’s words must have really hit home. My whole life—or at least Ali’s part in it—suddenly made so muc
h more sense. She’d loved me and protected me and taught me to be my own person because no one had ever done that for her.

  “The coven in town. Is it the same one you—”

  “No.” Ali didn’t even wait for me to finish the question. “I thought it might be. That’s part of the reason I went with you today, but I didn’t recognize any of the people we just saw, and if I had to guess, I’d say this coven is much smaller than ours was. Their knacks are ones I’ve seen before, but that’s to be expected. For every million people who have a way with animals, there’s one who can influence them; for all the people who can sing lullabies that put babies to sleep, there are a handful who can put normal people into a trance. Entering dreams just means you’re really good at getting inside other people’s heads, and I’d lay ten-to-one odds on this coven having an empath, because the hatred the three in town felt when they talked about werewolves wasn’t just theirs. Their pupils were the size of marshmallows.”

  I hadn’t been paying attention to pupil size, but I’d seen an alien depth to the emotion and recognized it as unnatural, dangerous. On some level, I’d felt the same thing when Bridget had spoken about Caroline. If someone was manipulating the psychics’ emotions to make them hate werewolves, it seemed like a fair assumption that the same person might be nudging them into being scared of Caroline.

  Or at least more scared than they otherwise would have been, given the whole “I was born to hunt” thing.

  “You said that most powers are just extensions of natural abilities—like the way Keely is really easy to talk to, and the way that people like me are … scrappy.” I paused. “But you heard how quiet Caroline was when she was tracking us. She got within an inch of us without me hearing her, smelling her, anything. At school yesterday, none of the Weres could catch her scent, and she says she has a way with weapons, that once she takes aim, she never misses a shot. That she can’t.” I decided to stop beating around the bush. “She feels like a predator, Ali. That’s not just a knack, and it really doesn’t seem that mental. Even the other psychics are scared of her. So is she one of them, or is she … something else?”