It hurt to hope.
It hurt to breathe.
Lake moved around the table with the precision of a surgeon, mid-operation, and the more shots she took, the closer the mask of fearlessness on her face came to slipping.
She wanted this.
She was fighting.
She was scared.
I ground my fingernails into the palm of my hand until red half-moons dotted my skin. I couldn’t feel the pain, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but wait for Lake to sink the next ball.
And then she missed.
With a sickening grin, Shay leaned down to the table, lined up his shot, and sent two balls ricocheting into opposite pockets with the ease of a pro. He worked his way around the table, shot after shot after shot.
I could feel Lake on the other side of the pack-bond, feel her insides shattering like glass as she tried so hard not to be scared. Seeing the bravado on her face nearly brought me to my knees.
Shay only had three balls left.
Then two.
Then one.
I knew then that I never should have let Lake risk it, never should have put her in a position where a game of pool could cost her everything, everything.
It’s going to be okay, Bryn. Whatever happens, it’ll be okay. Chase met my eyes, and for the first time in memory, I felt like I was looking at a stranger. If Shay won, if he took Lake, nothing would be okay. Not now, not ever. If Chase didn’t understand that, he didn’t understand me.
“Call your pocket.” Lake’s voice was steady, and she thrust her chin out, like she could make him miss by sheer force of will.
“Back left corner.”
My eyes went immediately to the pocket in question. If Shay made this shot, he’d win—the bet, Lake …
I saw the eight ball hit the corner of the pocket. Saw it hover there. Saw it fall in.
Protect. Protect. Survive.
As my Resilience rose up inside me, I could barely make out the world around me. I could barely see Lake, shutting down and shutting out the fear. I could barely see Shay, moving slowly toward her from one side, or Devon, cutting across the room from the other.
But I did see the cue ball as it bounced off one corner and rolled slowly toward another. My eyes tracked its progression, my fight-or-flight instinct taking control of my body even as they did.
Survive. Survive. Survive.
An instant before I completely lost it and gave in to the desire to do to Shay what I had done to the psychics on the street, the cue ball disappeared off the table, falling into one of the side pockets. Something gave inside me, and the blood-red haze began to fade.
Shay had just scratched.
On most shots, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, but I was familiar enough with pool to know that scratching on the eight ball meant forfeiting the game.
Shay had lost.
I was still trying to process this when Shay froze in his stride toward Lake.
Devon turned back toward the table. Lake grinned.
“Well,” she drawled, setting her own stick down, “that has to hurt.”
Lake had always been a horrible winner, and it took me a moment to find the naked, vulnerable relief underneath her gloating.
Shay scratched, I thought, letting myself believe it this time. He lost.
Beside me, I felt Chase reaching out, on the verge of saying something through the bond, but he must have decided against it, must have known how I would have taken it, because all there was between us was silence.
Relief painted my body with an unearthly, adrenaline-fueled glow. Lake was okay. I was okay. We were all okay—including Lucas, who Shay had just officially lost.
“Your permissions expire in a little over an hour,” I told Shay. “I expect you to retract your claim on Lucas and be off my land before then.”
I could feel Callum in the set of my jaw, the ease with which the words rolled off my tongue.
Shay snapped his pool cue in two, as easily as he could have—and would have—snapped my neck if it weren’t for Callum and the Senate. He stalked over to Lucas and lifted his limp body like a rag doll. Shay held him with one hand and flexed the fingers on the other until they began to take on the appearance of claws. He slashed his not-quite-human nails across Lucas’s face, and I felt the world shifting around us.
This was how pack transfers—the official kind—worked. The first alpha retracted his claim, cut off all mental ties, leaving the second alpha free to instate his—or in my case, her—own.
As I watched, unable to tear my eyes away, Shay wrenched his mind out of Lucas’s with all of the delicacy of a dentist using pliers to pull teeth.
“You are nothing to me,” he said, the words coming out more like a growl than any I’d ever heard spoken out loud. “I am nothing to you. If you step foot on Snake Bend territory again, I will kill you.”
With that, Shay dropped Lucas back onto the ground, and the younger Were’s back arched so hard and fast that I thought his body would snap in two.
“Lucas.” Maddy was by his side in an instant, and as the panic cleared from Lucas’s eyes and he met hers, I saw the contours of his face the way she did, felt his hand on hers as if it were mine.
Lone. Wolf.
My pack-sense trembled with the realization that Lucas didn’t feel foreign anymore—that now that Shay had released his hold, Lucas felt like something else altogether.
“He’s yours if you want him.” Shay kept his comment short and sweet. “But he’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
That sounded more like a promise than a threat, and I thought of the psychics and everything Lucas had already led—however unwittingly—straight to our door.
“I doubt the Senate will be pleased when they find out you’ve been making deals with psychics.” I tossed the words out like they meant nothing, but I saw the moment they hit their mark. “I may be new to all of this, but I’m fairly certain that bringing the outside world into Pack matters is frowned upon.”
Shay recovered before I could fully register how deep my threat had cut. “The Senate would want proof,” he said, “and without my help, I doubt you’ll be alive to give it.”
Without his help? I snorted. Shay had orchestrated all of this. He’d forced my hand to allow him entry to my lands, he’d strong-armed me into wagering one of my wolves against one of his, and now that he’d lost, he was trying to offer me help?
“Your pack has one adult male, fewer than a dozen teenagers, and a handful of children. You can’t expect to face down a coven of psychics on your own.”
To my left, Devon’s eyes glittered. “Would this be the same coven of psychics who are attacking us at your request?”
Shay shrugged, the human gesture completely at odds with the feral glint in his eyes. “The why and the how don’t matter. If I were you, I’d be more concerned with the when.”
Jed had warned me that Valerie might call an end to the armistice, repay my visit with one of her own now that she had a better idea of what I could do. Now, Shay seemed to be promising that Jed’s words would prove true.
“You have hours.” Shay began walking backward toward the door, each footstep falling like a gavel. “At most, you have a day. If and when you come to your senses, say the word, and the Snake Bend Pack would be more than willing to cross into your territory and fight on your side.”
Fight on our side? He was the one who’d set them on us. Maybe if I hadn’t realized that, I would have taken his offer as mercurial, but given everything I knew, it seemed absurd.
“You’re offering to fight on our side?” I asked. “Couldn’t you just tell them to back down?”
Shay smiled. “Invite us into your territory,” he said, “and I will.”
Every time I thought I had Shay’s strategy figured out, I peeled back a layer of his machinations and found another one underneath.
He’d sent Lucas here so he’d have a reason to come to my territory. He’d made a play for Lake, and ju
st in case that failed, he’d lined his pack up along our borders and sent the coven after me so that I’d have reason to invite his people in.
“The answer,” I said, the words working their way up from the pit of my stomach, uncompromising and sure, “is no.”
Backing me into a corner was a mistake, and someday, Shay would pay for it. Maybe not today, but eventually he’d regret every trap he’d laid for me and mine. I took a step toward him, this foreign alpha who didn’t belong here, and the rest of my pack moved in tandem, all eyes on Shay as we closed in.
He didn’t have my permission to be here any longer, and I wasn’t asking him for help.
Not surprisingly, given Shay’s pedigree, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink. He didn’t even shrug. Instead, he lowered his voice to a whisper that crawled up my spine. “Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re in danger, I’m here, and Callum’s not.”
The statement hung in the air, and without another word, Shay Shifted effortlessly into wolf form, and in a blur of timber-colored fur—his markings a perfect match for Devon’s—he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I KNEW BETTER THAN TO LET SHAY GET UNDER MY skin, but still, his parting shot hit me hard. I’d almost lost Lake—and Dev. I’d been threatened and burned, and another alpha was circling my territory, just waiting for an opportunity to swoop in.
There was a good chance the psychics were planning an attack.
And where was Callum?
Not here. He hadn’t even taken my phone call.
“If the psychics are planning to attack, we need to set up a defense.” I looked at the others, one after another: the peripherals, Lucas, my inner guard. “Able-bodied fighters need to be ready to fight. Earplugs are a must. Dev, tell Ali to get the younger kids together. They’re going on a field trip. Lake?”
Leaning back against the pool table, Lake preempted my next request. “Weapons?” she asked, all business.
“Anything that will help us secure the perimeter. I’m thinking some strategically placed explosives wouldn’t hurt.”
Some people lived for the phrase strategically placed explosives. Lake was one of those people.
“On it.”
I turned to Chase. “Help Maddy with Lucas,” I said.
Lucas’s bones were probably already healing, but he still hadn’t picked himself up off the floor. I couldn’t be sure how much damage Shay had done when he’d pulled out of Lucas’s head, so despite being free to claim him, I held back, uncertain if Lucas could take that kind of mental assault at the moment.
Besides, I had bigger fish to fry.
“Meet back here in half an hour,” I said. Just enough time for the others to finish their jobs and for me to get on with mine.
I didn’t know the coven’s plan of attack. I didn’t know the extent of their knacks. I didn’t know their weaknesses, or if killing Valerie would remove the emotional suggestions she’d planted.
But I knew somebody who probably did.
Callum might not have been omniscient. He might have seen the future as a complicated web, with possibilities branching out like leaves on a thousand-year-old tree. He might have been limited by distance, but chances were good that he’d know something.
More than I knew, at least.
Now that Shay was technically out of the picture, Callum’s sharing what he knew couldn’t be considered a political alliance. The coven wasn’t a part of our world, their safety wasn’t a Senate concern.
“You’re going to answer,” I said, willing the words to be true. “You have to.”
I picked up the phone. I dialed.
“Hello.”
One word. Just one—but the moment I heard Callum’s voice, I had to sit down.
“This is the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack,” I said, my voice shaking with the things I wasn’t saying. “We have a situation with some humans, and from one alpha to another, I need some advice.”
“Bryn.” That was all he said—my name—but it was enough to make me feel absolutely naked, like he could see the expression on my face, like he could see inside me, no matter how far away he was.
“Callum.” A hint of steel crept into my voice. This wasn’t a social call.
“Did you get my gift?”
“Yes.” I paused. “I don’t suppose it means that the key to the coven’s destruction is horses.”
Callum made a choking sound, and I wondered if I’d actually managed to surprise a laugh out of him.
“This is serious, Callum. We have kids here. Katie. Alex. A half dozen others under the age of ten. Ali’s packing them up as we speak.”
“And where are you sending them?”
There was only one place I could send them, one person I could trust with their safety. Callum had to know that.
Had to know that it was him.
“I’ll get them out of the line of fire however I can.” I danced around the truth.
“And how many escorts will you be sending with your little ones?” Callum did a passable job of sounding curious, but I wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t asking for his benefit.
He was asking for mine, and I realized almost immediately that I couldn’t send the kids off by themselves—and that I didn’t have many guards to spare. Counting the peripherals, and me, we had ten able-bodied fighters—eleven if Lucas could heal enough to fight by our side. I couldn’t spare more than one or two to escort the kids, and that wasn’t good enough, not when the coven—or, if he was up for risking the Senate’s wrath, Shay—could feasibly intercept them along the way.
“I’ll send the kids into lockdown here,” I told Callum, thinking out loud. “If we fight the psychics, there’ll probably be casualties, but to get to the kids, they’d have to take us all out, and I don’t think they have that kind of manpower, knacks or not.”
“Who do you think they’ll kill?”
If I hadn’t known Callum, hadn’t spent my entire life reading meaning into his most indecipherable tones, I would have thought the question was facetious, but it wasn’t.
He wanted names.
“You’d know better than I would,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.
Callum didn’t respond. I couldn’t even hear him breathing on the other side of the line, but werewolf hearing probably meant that he could hear the beating of my heart, the sound I made each time I swallowed.
“There are eleven of us,” I said, “assuming the wolf I just won from Shay can fight.” I didn’t mention that this assumption was stretching it, given Lucas’s current condition—and his previous experience with the psychics. “Chase, Maddy, and the peripherals are … scrappy.”
Like me, they had a way of surviving things that should have killed them dead.
“Devon’s Dev, and I don’t even know how old Mitch is.”
That left Lake. I’d already almost lost her once.
To Shay.
Thinking of the way Shay had looked at her, the expression on his face, made me remember exactly who and what Lake was. She was a female Were—one of very, very few, even with the addition of Changed Weres in my pack. Shay wouldn’t want her dead. If she died—if any of the females died—the hope that any of the alphas would be able to get their hands on them—now, a year from now, a hundred years from now—died, too.
“They won’t kill the females.”
I measured Callum’s response to my words.
Silence.
“The psychics have a deal with Shay,” I said, working through the logic out loud. “And Shay would want the females alive.”
The number of people Shay wanted dead was probably relatively small: me; Mitch if he got in the way; depending on Shay’s mood, maybe Devon …
“This isn’t war,” I said softly, unsure if I was talking to Callum or myself. “It’s a hit.”
Slowly, the layers of Shay’s plan crystallized in my mind. He’d set the psychics up to attack us. He’d offered me help, hoping to gain access to our territory, and when I’d re
fused …
“You could die, Bryn.” Callum confirmed my thoughts, and for the first time, I heard emotion in his words. It was faint, but it was there, and though I had to strain to hear it, once I did, something inside me, something broken, began putting itself back together again, bit by bit by bit.
“I could die,” I repeated. “If I do, Devon will go alpha.”
There was no doubt of that in my mind; with Dev, it was only a matter of time.
“Devon could die,” Callum said softly.
“And if Devon died …” I forced myself to imagine it. I was the alpha; Dev was my second-in-command. If we were both dead—
“There’s not an obvious third,” I said.
There were two ways to become alpha: as a member of a given pack, you could challenge and kill the current alpha and take their rank, or, if the alpha was killed by an outsider, you could be strong enough that there was never any question that you would be next in line. Mitch was too peripheral to lead. Lake, Chase, and Maddy—they all had their natural strengths, but the hierarchy between them was far from clear, and unlike most Weres, my pack wouldn’t jump straight to fighting it out for supremacy.
In the time it took for them to reach a consensus, they’d be easy targets.
Sitting ducks.
Open.
“Senate Law forbids taking another alpha’s wolf,” I said slowly. “But if there’s no alpha, then technically, there isn’t a pack.”
If the psychics killed me, if they killed Devon, there would be an opening, however brief, for someone else to come rushing in.
I thought of Shay’s wolves, lined up and down the edge of our border. Waiting.
“Dev can’t fight,” I said, coming to a conclusion that crept under my skin and hung in the air all around me. “If I fight, Devon can’t, and I have to fight.”
Callum didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. I was the alpha, and an alpha couldn’t run and hide, couldn’t send the pack off to fight, die on their own. The pack needed me there, the same way the peripherals had needed to see me when they’d arrived at the Wayfarer, the same way the others looked to me for the signal to run on the full moon.
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