Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them, you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are. It’s lonely. It’s impossible. It’s all-consuming.”

  It is what it is.

  Callum didn’t say it. Neither did I. But it was there, between us. And it was true.

  “Okay,” I said, fighting for acceptance the way a drowning man tries for air. “Devon can’t fight. I can’t risk sending the kids away, because someone could intercept them before they get to you. During the actual confrontation, the coven will be gunning for me, and they’ll be under orders from Shay not to kill any of the female Weres.”

  Granted, Callum hadn’t said any of that. He’d just sat there, on the other end of the line, asking questions and letting me come to it on my own.

  “Now I just need a plan for neutralizing the coven as quickly as possible,” I said. “Any idea if taking out their leader will free up the others’ minds?”

  Callum didn’t respond.

  “Callum? Words of wisdom? Cryptic hints? Anything?”

  Nothing. No answer. Silence.

  And that was when I realized he’d already hung up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AS I STALKED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND BACK TOWARD the restaurant, my mind jumped from one thought to another, a never-ending medley of the things Callum had said, the promised confrontation with the psychics, and Jed’s suggestion that the only way to stop Valerie was to kill her. I thought of the carving Callum had sent me, and remembered all the times growing up that I’d seen him with a piece of wood in his hands. I remembered “borrowing” his knife when I was eight, trying to carve something myself. If Ali had been the one to catch me unsupervised with the sharp object, she would have freaked, but Callum had just sat down behind me and pulled me onto his lap. He’d put his hands over mine, guiding them, ready to catch the blade if it slipped.

  Was that why he’d sent it to me? To let me know that even now, he was doing the same thing? Or was the message really that he couldn’t do that anymore, that this time, if the knife slipped, I’d bleed?

  Hurt.

  Die.

  “You okay?” Chase fell into step with me, and I felt his presence the way I always did, in my flesh and bones: a flash of similarity, a desire for the space between us to disappear.

  This time, I kept my distance.

  “Lucas is healing. He seems a little more … present now. Maddy’s with him.” Chase paused, and I could feel him debating whether to continue. “He’s asking for you.”

  Getting out of Snake Bend had been only half of Lucas’s goal; he’d said from the beginning that he wanted to be a part of our pack, and now, with Shay out of the way, there was nothing to keep me from giving Lucas his wish.

  Except, of course, for the fact that the psychics might pick any moment to descend.

  “It can wait,” Chase said, and even though I’d been thinking more or less the same thing, coming from him, it chafed—maybe because I couldn’t help remembering that he’d used that same soft, quiet tone to tell me that even if we lost Lake, it would be okay.

  It wouldn’t have been okay. And neither would I.

  “Shay wants the females alive.” I changed the subject—out loud and in my head. “That’s the good news.”

  “You’ll make the girls our first line of defense, then.” After my one-sided conversation with Callum, Chase actually answering me made for a pleasant change of pace. “If Maddy, Lake, Phoebe, and Sage take the perimeter, then the psychics will have to work their way back to the rest of us with less than lethal force. It’s a good plan, Bryn. It buys the rest of us some time.”

  “Not all of us.”

  “The bad news?” Chase guessed.

  I nodded. “I’m going to ask Dev not to fight.”

  I expected Chase to ask why. He didn’t.

  “He won’t say yes.” Chase didn’t—wouldn’t—look at me, but even from this angle, I could see that his expression had gone carefully neutral.

  “Devon won’t be happy about it,” I corrected. “But he’ll do it.”

  Maybe that was the difference between Chase and Dev. Neither one of them wanted to see me hurt. They both would have died for me, the same way I would have died for them. They felt an animal need to protect me, and always had—but at the end of the day, Dev felt that way about other things, too. He would have gone to Shay’s pack to protect Lake. He’d stand down on this fight for the good of the pack.

  “Dev will do it,” I said, taking a page from Chase’s book and staring straight ahead. “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Bryn,” Chase said, reaching for my arm, his touch light against my skin.

  “Would it even matter,” I asked him, feeling that touch to my core, “if I told you it was what I wanted? If it was what needed to happen for us to know that the pack was going to come out of this okay?”

  To his credit, Chase didn’t hesitate before he answered. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. “No.”

  “Well,” I said roughly, “then I guess it’s a good thing I’m not asking you.”

  Chase’s hand tightened, ever so slightly, his touch turning to a hold. He stopped walking, and I turned to face him.

  “If it came down to me or the pack,” Chase said, his face giving away nothing, his mind calm and cool on the other end of the bond, “what would you choose?”

  I tried to process the fact that he was even asking, that from his perspective, in his mind, that was even okay.

  “You’d choose the pack,” Chase said. He moved his hand from my arm to my chin, angling my eyes gently toward him. “I know that, Bryn. I’m okay with it, and I will never ask you to choose.”

  I searched his eyes, wishing that I could smell the truth on him, the way he could on me.

  “If it ever comes down to a choice between me and the pack, I want you to choose them. Don’t think about it, don’t second-guess it, don’t feel guilty after the fact. I know you, Bryn. I know you, and I am not asking you to change.” His lips curved upward in a slow, sad smile, and I thought about what Callum had said about being alpha—it was lonely, it was impossible, it was all-consuming.

  Chase brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “But at the end of the day, Bryn, if I had to choose between you and the pack, I would choose you—every single time, no questions asked. You need to know that, because that’s who I am, and it’s not going to change. Not now, not ever. For me, it will always, always be you, even if deep down, you wish I could be something or someone else.”

  Standing there, looking at Chase and listening to him say something I hadn’t even allowed myself to think, I knew objectively that I wasn’t being fair. That I couldn’t expect the pack to matter to him the way it did to me. That he had accepted what I was, even though it meant that he would never be my number-one priority, the way I was his.

  I knew it wasn’t fair to him to expect more than that, but with everything that had happened in the past few days—with everything that was on the verge of happening even now—I couldn’t convince myself that mattered.

  I would always choose the pack. Chase would always choose me—and I wasn’t sure I could accept that, fair or not.

  Unable to think, to breathe, I brushed my lips lightly over his, pretending for a moment that the two of us were the only people in the world, and then I turned and ran for the Wayfarer, where we weren’t.

  “Are you actually asking me to let you go out there and fight the coven alone?” Dev’s voice was surprisingly pleasant. He shifted his gaze from me to Chase, who’d followed on my heels, and raised his eyebrows in a look meant to convey that I was crazy.

  Ignoring said look, I tried to stay focused on the task at hand. “The coven is working for Shay. Shay wants our females, so he set the coven up to take me out of the picture without irreparably damaging the girls. Once I’m gone, you’re next in line for alpha
, Dev. Think about it. Shay would have taken you in exchange for Lucas—is he really that sentimental, or do you think he just wanted you out of the way?”

  “Touché,” Devon said. His mother had beaten me unconscious at Callum’s command. His brother had tortured a wolf under his care. The Macalisters weren’t really a family known for their sentimentality.

  “Dev, if you stay and the coven kills both of us, Shay will sweep in and pick the females off one by one. Is that what you want for Lake? For Maddy? For Katie and Lily and—”

  “Enough.” Devon held up one palm in a gesture that looked so choreographed, I almost smiled. “You’ve convinced me that only one of us can fight.”

  “So you’ll take Ali and the kids and hunker down somewhere safe until the threat has passed?”

  Dev snorted. “Not for all the tea in China. Not for front-row seats at Fashion Week. Not for a featured role on Glee.”

  I snorted right back at him. “Tell me how you really feel, Dev.”

  “You’re the alpha. That means that you have to come first. And like it or not, you’re human, and that means you’re—”

  “Breakable?” I suggested, the word Shay had used dripping sarcastically from my own lips. “I’m also Resilient. What happens when Valerie starts messing with your emotions? Or when Bridget whistles a little ditty that turns you from teen wolf into a sitting duck? Lucas said one of the psychics can control wolves. What happens if you can’t fight her off?”

  Devon’s jaw snapped shut, and for once, he was absolutely silent. I waited, my eyes locked on his, his locked on mine, and after a long moment, he nodded. He wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t admit that there was even the smallest possibility that I was right, but he would take the younger kids and go, because I’d asked.

  He would do what had to be done, even if it killed him. Even if it killed me.

  He’d do it for the pack.

  “Well, this is nice and cozy.”

  If the circumstances had been different, it might have been gratifying to see the way the boys jumped then, given that I’d spent most of my life with werewolves sneaking up on me, but the person who’d gotten the drop on them was standing with her back against the opposite wall, a gun in her hand, blonde hair concealing the left half of her face.

  “Caroline.”

  She shrugged, like my saying her name was an accusation—one to which she was completely indifferent.

  “Did you come here to warn us?” Devon asked, putting melodramatic emphasis on the word. Swooping in to issue her mother’s ultimatums was more or less Caroline’s MO.

  “I don’t know why I came here,” Caroline said, looking down at the gun. “But if you want to take it as a warning, that works. My mother won’t be able to hold the others back much longer.”

  “Hold them back,” I repeated. “Yeah. Right.”

  “You couldn’t make it easy,” Caroline said, ignoring my sarcasm. “You couldn’t just give us that thing and walk away.”

  “That thing as in Chase?” I asked, following her gaze to my left, where Chase was eyeing Caroline with detached objectivity, even as his lupine nature became more apparent in his posture, his expression, the feel of his mind.

  “Or that thing as in Lucas?” I continued. “Maybe you’d like my baby sister? She’s not quite a year old yet, but she’s a holy horror when she doesn’t get her way.”

  “You’re like them,” Caroline told me, her pupils beginning to bleed outward as she stepped away from the shadows. “You’re just like them.”

  “No,” I said, aware that Chase was close—very close—to Shifting. “They’re just like you. Did you know they used to be human—Chase and Maddy and the rest? They were human, just like you. They were attacked, just like you. They survived. For that matter, so did I.” I thought about what Jed had said about the man who’d led the coven before Valerie. “My parents didn’t.”

  My words seemed to snap Caroline out of it. She stopped moving forward. Genuine emotion overrode whatever psychic push Valerie had left in her daughter’s head, and I saw an instant of doubt, vulnerable and raw, in Caroline’s blue eyes, a single moment during which she wanted desperately to believe that she wasn’t alone.

  That she wasn’t a monster.

  That someone, anyone else could understand.

  “Do you really think this is about Lucas?” I asked her. “You really think that your mother is willing to go up against an entire pack of werewolves just so she can squeeze out a few extra days of torturing one? Valerie wants to fight. She wants you to want to fight, and I think we both know that your mother has a way of getting what she wants.”

  Uncertainty danced around the edges of Caroline’s features, but the mere mention of her mother was enough to make her pupils pulse. I thought of Ali’s description of her own childhood, growing up under the constant influence of an empath.

  If she was sad, I was sad. If she was angry, I was angry. I loved her so much, because she wanted me to.

  Caroline wasn’t angry. She wasn’t sad. I wasn’t even sure she loved her mother, but whatever she was feeling, she felt it irrevocably and intensely, and the emotion had a mind of its own.

  She glanced down at the gun in her hand and then back up at me. I had a single second to process the realization that if Valerie wanted me dead, she didn’t need a whole coven to do it.

  “She didn’t send me here,” Caroline said, turning the gun over in her hand. “I came on my own, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again, lifting the gun. “What I want doesn’t matter. What you want doesn’t matter. This is what I was made for. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I do.”

  I felt a flare of energy the second before Chase Shifted. Caroline switched her gaze from me to him, and my heart jumped into my throat when I realized that a girl who’d been programmed to hate werewolves was standing there, watching him Shift, her hand on a gun.

  Caroline’s knuckles went white. Her blue eyes bled black again. She turned her attention from Chase to me, and she raised the gun.

  Bryn.  Mine. Protect.

  Chase’s thoughts. Before I could process them—or what the wolf was about to do—he leapt, straight for the gun pointed at me.

  Straight for Caroline’s throat.

  Devon jumped forward, Shifting in midair faster and more fluidly than any Were I’d ever seen. His body slammed against Chase’s, and the muted sound of flesh hitting flesh was drowned out by the snapping of teeth and a low, vibrating growl.

  Almost instantly, Dev was back on four feet, and he whirled around, bringing the full force of his massive size to bear on Caroline, matching Chase’s growl with one of his own. The message was clear, even to an outsider: Devon had saved her, but if Caroline gave him reason to, he’d kill her himself.

  Caroline’s eyes went suddenly blue, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints as she stared at Devon in wolf form. For whatever reason, seeing him had knocked out the effects of Valerie’s interference, and for a split second, I relaxed.

  Then Caroline’s finger tightened around the trigger. With no warning whatsoever, she took aim and fired—but not at me.

  In her right mind and of her own volition, she put a silver bullet straight through Devon’s heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  YOU CAN KNOW, OBJECTIVELY, THAT YOUR BEST friend isn’t allergic to silver. You can be fully aware that, setting the silver issue aside, most werewolves can take a bullet to the heart and come out of it okay. You can know it, and it doesn’t matter.

  The second I saw the bullet pierce Devon’s chest, I was on the floor beside him, saying his name out loud, calling to him through the pack-bond, willing him to be okay. My hands warm and sticky with his blood, I felt the Change ripple through his body as he Shifted back to human form.

  “Dev. You’re going to be okay, Devon. You’re going to be fine.”

  He said something—softly. I couldn’t make it out, couldn’t get my human ears to decipher whatever h
e was trying to say.

  You’re going to be okay, Dev. You’re going to be fine.

  If I could have made it an order, I would have. I would have ordered him to be okay, but I didn’t get the chance, because he spoke again—silently this time—and I heard what he said just fine.

  Caroline.

  I felt a pulse of rage go through my body, and all around me, the rest of the pack felt it, too.

  The smell of Devon’s blood brought the rest of the pack straight to us, and as a unit, they turned their attention on Caroline. She moved quickly, quietly. Mitch caught her roughly by one arm, but an instant later, he was wearing a dagger through his bicep, and she was gone.

  She dove out a window, straight through the glass.

  The pack wanted to follow. They wanted to tear her open, hunt her down, make her bleed the way Devon was bleeding now.

  Prey. Prey. Prey.

  With their animal instincts beating a constant rhythm in my mind, I could feel the desire rising in my own body: tears in my eyes, a tightening in my throat, and the thrum of my heart and theirs all around me.

  “Could be … trap,” Devon wheezed.

  The second I heard his voice, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Appreciating his meaning took me a second longer. Caroline had just taken out one of our strongest fighters and whetted the pack’s desire for blood. Every instinct they had, every instinct I had said to chase her.

  But what if that was what she wanted?

  I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Valerie had sent her daughter here to lure us out, even though the memory of Caroline’s eyes—blue and completely her own—and the expression on her ashen face as she’d leveled the gun at Dev made me think that none of this had been planned, that she hadn’t come here to kill anyone, that shooting Dev after he’d saved her life had been … personal.

  Time was passing. Precious seconds, and once Caroline was out of eyesight, she was impossible to track. The pack wanted to go after her. I wanted to go after her. But I couldn’t take the chance that it was a trap.