Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Cedar and cinnamon. Chase.

  He wasn’t bleeding.

  I wasn’t burned.

  And the ground beneath us was … not ground, I realized. It was concrete, and though the sky stretched out in all directions above us, here on earth, we were surrounded by walls.

  Bars. Titanium and reinforced steel.

  It took me a moment to realize where we were: Callum’s basement, the place where we’d first met, when Chase was newly turned and half wild with moonlust, and I was stupid and impulsive and unable to stay away.

  This time, I was in the cage with him, and he was human.

  “Caroline shot you,” I said softly, wishing I could say something else. “You got bitten by a snake.”

  Chase blinked, his eyes brimming with acceptance—and something else. “Yeah.”

  I reached for his cheek. He nuzzled my hand.

  “That snake was going for Maddy,” I said, wondering if this was the last time I would ever touch him, feel the warmth of his skin. “You took its bite for her.”

  Chase reached out, touched my cheek, and I leaned into his hand. “I told you that if it came down to the pack or you, it would always be you. But if it comes down to me and them …”

  I closed my eyes, rubbed my cheek against his hand.

  “I’d pick them,” he said softly. “For you.”

  Callum had said that being alpha was lonely—but all I could think, lying there next to Chase, sharing this dream, was that I wasn’t alone.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I told him, my lips a fraction of an inch away from his. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Bryn,” he said, his breath warm on my face, his voice wild and irrepressible and sure. “Love you.”

  We’d shared dreams before, back when we were hunting the Rabid—enough for me to know that anything Chase said here was as real as words he said when we were awake.

  There was no coming back from this moment, not now, not ever.

  Somewhere his body was bleeding, poisoned with venom and silver.

  Somewhere my body was burned.

  But here, in this dream, as we lay side by side in a cage with all of heaven spread out above us, we were okay.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  “Love you, Bryn,” Chase said again, his voice hoarse. “Always you.”

  My mouth went cotton dry, and for a moment, I was scared—terrified—that I wouldn’t be able to say it back. But somehow, I found the words, convinced my mouth to string them into a sentence—one that felt true.

  “Love you, too.”

  The moment I said the words, his body gave in to the poison, and he began seizing. His limbs twitched, but he didn’t Shift. He didn’t blink. He didn’t take his eyes off mine. He just faded away, bit by bit by bit, until I was lying there alone, the ghost of his touch lingering on my fingertips, my lips warm and swollen with the kiss we hadn’t shared.

  Bryn. Bryn. Bryn.

  I sat up in the cage and willed myself to wake up so that I could go to him, save him, but instead, the world around me morphed, until the sky was nothing but stars, nothing but brightness, and I wasn’t alone.

  “You.” The word ripped its way out of my throat, but I couldn’t coax my body into moving, couldn’t rip the intruder’s jugular out, the way I should have the first time we’d met.

  “Me,” Archer said. The word sounded like some kind of confession. “It’s just me this time, Bryn.”

  No nicknames, no gloating. This was a side to my psychic stalker that I hadn’t seen before. I glanced at his eyes and noted the ring of lighter color around the pupil, and then I realized what he was trying to tell me.

  “Just you,” I repeated. That meant that Valerie was …

  “Dead,” Archer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. He flicked his wrist with halfhearted showmanship, and images flashed into my mind, courtesy of his psychic interference. This time, there were no flames—just a series of still shots of the coven’s members, bleeding from the nose. “When Valerie died, her influence went with her. It was sudden. It hurt. But it was enough for the rest of us to realize that the monsters we were fighting weren’t.”

  “Weren’t fighting?”

  “Weren’t monsters.” Archer looked at me with an expression somewhere between pity and pain. “You’re just kids.”

  He couldn’t have been more than five or six years my senior, but for a split second, I could almost see myself the way he did: sixteen, battered, old eyes, thin.

  “I’d like to say that we didn’t know what we were doing,” Archer said, trying to sound like the words didn’t matter to him nearly as much as they did. “But we weren’t completely brainwashed. We knew. Valerie just made us feel like it didn’t matter, made us hate you enough that we didn’t want to question what that hatred was making us do. We let it happen. I let it happen.”

  I shut Archer down before he could say the word sorry, because I didn’t want to hear it. “I need to wake up,” I told him. “Now.”

  I didn’t have time for apologies. I didn’t need to be along for the ride as he worked his way through the question of whether he and the rest of the coven were villains or victims.

  I needed to get out of here. I needed to wake up. I needed to protect what was left of my pack.

  “Let me go.”

  “I’m not the one keeping you here,” Archer said. “The fight’s over. It’s been over. You and some of the others—on both sides—were pretty beat up. You’ve been out for three days.”

  That wasn’t possible. He had to be messing with me, playing with my mind, keeping me here when there was still something I could do to protect what was mine. I couldn’t afford to take his words at face value, couldn’t trust anything I’d seen through his mind—no matter how true it felt.

  I had to make sure that the other psychics had stopped fighting when Valerie took a bullet to the head. For all I knew, while I was stuck in a dream with Archer, Caroline was out there in the real world retaliating for her mother’s death. She could be taking aim at—

  Ali.

  The memory of my last conscious moment came rushing back. I’d been facing off against Valerie, against Caroline, pushing my body past every limit and clinging to consciousness by a thread. Caroline had pointed her gun at me. Valerie had given the order—and Ali, my Ali, had shot the coven leader dead.

  If Archer was lying, if Caroline was still out there …

  I moved to grab Archer by the lapels, but my hands sank through his body, like one of us was a ghost. “Wake. Me. Up.”

  Archer opened his mouth, then closed it. He took a step backward, his body solidifying once more. He held up one hand in invitation.

  I didn’t have the luxury of debating whether or not to take it. This was  Ali we were talking about here.

  The moment my hand touched Archer’s, images flooded my brain in rapid fire: things he seemed to feel he owed it to me to share.

  Not lies.

  Like a slide show, the images flashed through my mind, bits and pieces of things that Archer had seen in other people’s dreams, in reality.

  I saw Devon Shifting from human form and Caroline’s knuckles going white around the handle of a gun.

  Flash.

  I saw a little blonde girl, covered in blood. I saw her scramble backward as a large wolf—Devon? No, not Devon, not quite—approached.

  Flash.

  I saw Ali lifting a gun and taking aim at a woman exactly her height. I saw her pull the trigger, saw Valerie go down.

  I heard Caroline say four simple words: “You shot my mother.”

  Flash.

  I saw Ali releasing the clip on her gun. She lowered her hands to her sides. She met Caroline’s eyes and waited for the girl to shoot.

  “For what it’s worth,” Ali said, her voice catching in her throat as she looked back at Valerie’s body, “she was my mother, too.”

  I woke up stiff, with morning breath and a body that felt like it had been put throu
gh a blender. It was dark outside my window, night just beginning to give way to the last moment before the dawn. Before I even opened my eyes, my pack-sense went haywire, flooding my body with thoughts and emotions, locations, tastes and smells.

  Instantly, I knew where each member of my pack was. I knew who was awake and who was sleeping, who was injured, who was dead.

  “You’re awake.” The voice was quiet, female, flat. I reached for the knife I kept on my nightstand, but it wasn’t there.

  “Devon didn’t kill my father.” Caroline said those words the way someone else might have said hello. “I didn’t kill that Were.”

  That Were.

  I knew who she was talking about. I could see his very human corpse in my mind—lanky and in desperate need of a haircut.

  “His name was Eric,” I said.

  He’d been a freshman in college. The oldest of the Changed Weres. Excited to go to dorm parties. The first to speak up when things went awry.

  “He was ours.”

  Words like peripheral meant nothing in death. Eric’s absence was noticeable—a phantom limb, a gaping hole in my psyche. In human terms, we hadn’t known each other very long or very well, but right now, I didn’t feel human. I felt like I’d let Eric down. Like I should have protected him. Like I’d failed.

  I didn’t shed a tear, didn’t even think about it. I wanted to go out to the woods, where the others had buried Eric, and howl.

  “I could have killed him,” Caroline said, her own voice catching. “I was so angry, so scared, it was so much—and I could have put a bullet right through his heart. I had the shot, and I didn’t take it. I never miss, Bryn, but she couldn’t make me aim to kill.”

  That was the first time Caroline had mentioned her mother, but I couldn’t read any emotion in her words, other than something empty, something fierce.

  “I shot that Were—Eric—but I wasn’t the one who killed him. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  I struggled to sit up, make myself taller, taking stock of my injuries as I did. In the time I’d been unconscious, I’d already started healing, but my left forearm was as good as useless, burned and wrapped in gauze. I thought of Jed and the layers and layers of scars decorating his aging flesh.

  Werewolves healed quickly. Short of silver poisoning or being literally torn to pieces, they bounced back with minimal scars, but I wasn’t a werewolf, and unless I turned, someday, I’d be as old and scarred and battle-worn as Jed, strong enough to survive, with the things I’d lived through etched into the surface of my skin.

  “After I took that last shot, there was an explosion. Jed pulled me out, dragged me away. He tried to take my gun.”

  This time, I did see a flicker of emotion. Little Miss Huntress didn’t like being disarmed.

  “We fought. I let him think he’d won, and the second he came out of fight mode, I knocked him out and dragged him far enough away from the explosions that I knew he’d be okay. Then I went after you.” Caroline shrugged, like nothing she’d said so far was important, like none of it mattered, to her or to me. “You know the rest.”

  She stayed in the shadows, her back against the wall, the distance between us the only thing that kept me from reaching out with my one good arm and grabbing her by the throat.

  As much as I didn’t want to, I believed her when she said that she hadn’t killed Eric—but either way, she’d shot him, left him as easy prey for the coven and their bag of tricks. She’d put a bullet in Lake’s dad and one in Chase, and the last time I’d seen her, she’d had a gun trained on the one person in this world who’d always been there, always been on my side, from day one.

  “You didn’t shoot Ali?” I meant the words as a statement, but they came out like a question.

  Caroline didn’t respond.

  I could feel Ali, faintly, through the bond. Her mind was as much a mystery to me as always, and habit kept me from pushing past her walls. She was alive. She was safe. Everything beyond that—the sequence of events leading up to her putting Valerie down, the moment she’d recognized the coven leader as the woman who’d thrown her away, those final moments before Caroline had put down her gun—those things were hers alone.

  “You’re Ali’s sister.” I looked for a resemblance and found none. There was nothing of Ali in Caroline’s baby-doll features, nothing that should have told me that the empath who’d abandoned Ali because she didn’t have powers was the same one who’d taught Caroline to believe she was nothing without hers.

  A memory—of Valerie reaching out and brushing my hair out of my face as she tried to stab her way through my mental defenses—flashed before my eyes, and I thought of the hundred thousand times Ali had done the exact same thing.

  They were nothing alike.

  “I’m not anyone’s sister,” Caroline said. “I’m not anyone. For what it’s worth, I could have killed you, all of you, in that fight, but I didn’t.”

  Caroline didn’t sound like she thought that was worth all that much—and, fair or not, given the circumstances, I agreed with her appraisal. I knew better than most people what it was like to have the rug pulled out from underneath your very existence, to find out that everything you thought you knew was a lie, but I couldn’t summon up any pity for her. I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. I had no desire to understand.

  “You’re awake!” Dev glided into the room with the grace of a Broadway dancer. Clearly, he’d had time to heal completely, and just as clearly, he didn’t hold it against the other occupant of this room that she’d been the one to shoot him. “Has Caroline been filling you in?”

  He said her name so easily, like she was just any other girl.

  “She shot you,” I said, thoroughly disgruntled.

  Dev shrugged. “Like Lake’s never threatened to do the same. Ms. Mitchell’s a menace with a shotgun. We love her anyway.” Dev actually had the audacity to start humming an upbeat little ditty.

  “ ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’?” I said. “Really?”

  Bryn, she shot me because I look like Shay. Dev didn’t elaborate on his silent statement, but the rest of the scenes Archer had shown me in my dream fell firmly into place. The werewolf who’d attacked Caroline when she was little, the one who’d killed her father, looked so much like Devon did now that unless you knew wolves—really knew them—you wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other. They shared the same massive size, the same markings.

  The same parents.

  Shay killed Caroline’s dad.

  That truth was like a splash of cold water in my face. Jed had told me that Valerie had taken to leading the coven a little too easily, a little too well. She’d never shown the hatred for werewolves that she’d instilled in the others. She was the type of person who could throw her own daughter away.

  It wasn’t a stretch to think that she could have orchestrated the death of her husband.

  I’d wondered about the terms of the deal Valerie had made with Shay, and now they were inescapably clear. She hadn’t attacked us to curry favor with Shay; she’d been paying off a debt—an old one.

  Turning this over in my mind, I looked at Caroline—really looked at her—and wondered if she’d connected those dots.

  Probably best not to ask, Bryn, Devon said quietly. She doesn’t talk about it, but she’s dealing.

  She. As in Caroline. Ali’s sister, the self-proclaimed hunter of werewolves.

  “Eric’s dead,” I said, unable to forgive her that, even if she hadn’t been fully in control of her own mind, even if she’d resisted the urge to shoot to kill. “She shot him, and now he’s dead.”

  Devon fell into a standstill, the expression on his face 100 percent wolf.

  I know, he said silently, the words echoing through the pack-bond between us like a cry of mourning, a song for the dead. I know. I know. I know.

  “I was supposed to protect him,” I said softly.

  Dev nodded, accepting my words. “I wasn’t even there.”

  I felt the wei
ght of that. So did he. It would have been so much easier to put it all off on someone else—say, for instance, the person who’d put a bullet through Eric’s leg.

  Caroline didn’t feel like a threat to me, not anymore, but I didn’t want to see the tear tracks on her face.

  I wanted her gone.

  She’s  Ali’s sister, Bryn. Her mother is dead. Devon’s words inside my head were like a gentle nudge with a massive wet nose. You do the math.

  I didn’t want to do the math.

  “I want to see Chase,” I said, clinging to that instead. His presence on the other end of the pack-bond was muted, but it was there. He was weak, but he was healing.

  He was alive. Impossibly, undeniably, wonderfully alive.

  “We had to move him to the far side of the property.” Dev held up a hand and wiggled his fingers, holding off my protest. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he said. “You don’t get to complain about this. The closer he was to you, the faster he healed, but neither one of you was waking up. You shouldn’t have been out more than a couple of hours, but whatever it is you all can do, however that pesky little knack of yours works—yours was doing the work for him.”

  I thought of the dreamworld, where Chase and I had lain side by side. I thought of the walls between us melting away and the things I would have given—everything—to make him okay. Chase was Resilient. So was I. We’d shared dreams often enough that I didn’t question the idea that we’d done it again, and it seemed right that after everything he’d given up for me, I’d somehow funneled some of my strength to him.

  I didn’t know how it worked or what it meant, but at that instant, I didn’t care.

  “Chase was getting better. You weren’t.” Coming from Devon, that was clearly a condemnation of Chase. “You usually have more sense than that.”

  Apparently, it was also a condemnation of me.

  I gave Devon a look. “Did you actually just accuse me of normally having common sense?”

  Dev finally cracked a smile. “Touché.”

  I didn’t realize that Caroline had left the room until I looked for her and discovered her gone.

  Good.