Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I could feel his anguish, sewn into the air all around me, and the hum of the pack’s acknowledgment that a challenge to the alpha had to be met.

  It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Were; the mandate was there in my head, too. I felt it in the marks Callum had left in my skin. I felt it in the bond that made me who and what I was.

  Fight. Fight. Fight.

  It would have been so easy to give in to the instinct, to let the world go red and go out fighting without feeling a single instant of pain, but this time, flashing out seemed like giv- ing up.

  There had to be another answer.

  There had to be.

  The sound of Lucas Shifting tore me from my thoughts. How could I ever have thought he was scraggly or malnourished? He was hungry—there was a difference.

  I felt the pain of his Shift as an echo in the bond that I’d thrown at him, and an image came to mind, of an old woman standing in front of three grown Weres, forcing them to halt mid-Shift.

  I’m the alpha, I thought. Until he kills me, I’m the alpha.

  Physically, I might have been the weaker party, but mentally, I was dominant. I always had been. There was a reason the Cedar Ridge Pack had chosen me as their leader, and it wasn’t my physique.

  I pictured the bond that tied Lucas to the rest of the pack. I pictured the portion of it that tied him to me. I’d done that.  Me. I couldn’t take it back, but there was a chance I could use it.

  Lucas came toward me, and I stepped forward to meet him. I caught his eye, and I pushed. His lip curled and he leapt forward.

  Stop! The command snapped out of me like it had been shot from a cannon and traveled through the pack-bond to Lucas, who jerked back suddenly to land a foot in front of me, just short of his goal. His teeth flashed and he let loose a sick and bone-crunching bark, but his body didn’t move. I could see the nails on his feet digging into the frozen ground as he strained against my hold.

  Somebody hadn’t realized that to take down an alpha, you had to be able to fight them in more ways than one.

  For a few seconds, I stood there, staring at him and willing him to lie down, belly up. He fought me. He pushed back, and as he lost himself to animal rage, to panic, it got harder and harder to hold him.

  Keeping him from killing me wasn’t enough.

  I had to end this, but I didn’t know how. Even as my own instincts surfaced, even as I threw everything I had—Resilience included—into the bond, I couldn’t fathom the idea of ordering someone to die.

  If I could keep him still enough, if I was sure I could hold him—

  No.

  It wasn’t working. I was fighting, fighting, fighting, and it wasn’t enough. I needed more. More power. A stronger will. Something.

  An image began to form in my mind, a ridiculous image that I didn’t have time for, one of me and Chase lying in Callum’s cage, looking up at the stars. I heard Devon’s voice telling me that when Chase had been on the brink of death, somehow I’d taken everything I might have used to heal myself and given it to him.

  The stronger the pack, the stronger the alpha.

  That was the way it worked. That was why Shay wanted greater numbers. That was why the rest of the alphas would have sold their souls for what was mine.

  I was Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. I was impossible. And I was not giving up. My body started to shake with the strain of holding Lucas off. He inched closer. I gritted my teeth. I pictured the pack-bond that connected me to Chase, to Lake, to Devon and all the rest.

  I pictured their power, and I pulled.

  The rush was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and with it came the rest of their instincts—the bloodlust and the adrenaline and the need to force this challenger down.

  My body alive with that power, I turned my attention back to Lucas and said a single word: “Down.”

  Lucas fell to the ground. His mouth snapped shut. His eyes opened wide with fear. Even with the power of the pack—and their animal instincts—flowing through me, like charge through a wire, I wanted to let him live.

  I wanted to give him another chance.

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

  Over, I told him, my mind-voice echoing with power that wasn’t mine. Lucas rolled onto his side. I knelt next to him, fear nothing more than a memory, a distant memory, like maybe every time I’d ever felt it was nothing more than a dream.

  Challenge. Challenge. Challenge.

  Kill. Kill. Kill.

  I held Lucas there in wolf form. I looked into his eyes. I ran one hand gently over the fur on his neck, and then, with the power of an entire pack behind me, their Resilience bleeding into mine, I told him to go to sleep.

  Forever.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EVERY MORNING, I WOKE UP AND I SAW THE PERSON who’d killed Lucas staring back at me in the mirror. Every night, I went to bed wondering if there was ever a point where I could have stopped him from drawing that line in the sand. Like clockwork, I stared up at my ceiling, analyzing all the moments, big and small, that had led to his challenge. I searched for an answer that wouldn’t have led to my looking into his eyes and watching him die.

  I knew Lucas wouldn’t have survived long without the protection of a pack. If I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d turned him away, the outcome would have been the same—at least for him.

  I blamed myself for not being able to get through to him. I blamed Shay for setting me up. But mostly, I blamed the fact that when Lucas had challenged me, he’d had reason to believe that he would win.

  If I’d been stronger, if I’d been faster, if I’d been the type of opponent that other people feared, Lucas would still be alive. He’d challenged me because I was human. I’d won because I wasn’t—not really, not anymore.

  Chase slid into bed beside me, the way he had every night since the fight. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t yell at me, the way Devon had beforehand, or say that he’d recognized the darkness in Lucas, the desperation, even though he had. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. He just held me, and I breathed in his scent.

  Every night, he was there.

  And even though I was lonely, I wasn’t alone.

  A week before Christmas, Maddy came to me. It had been eleven days since Lucas’s challenge.

  “I’m leaving.” She said the words calmly, but I knew what they had cost her. The Wayfarer was Maddy’s home. We were her family.

  She was already gone.

  “I don’t blame you,” Maddy said. I stared at her, and she amended her statement. “I don’t want to, but every time I see you, I see him. Every time I hear you, I hear him, and I know it was his fault. I know that he’s the one who did this to you and to me, and I want to hate him for it, but I don’t. I can’t, and I can’t be here. I can’t stay here.”

  “Maddy, it’s okay.” I’d known she was going to leave— probably before she did.

  “No,” Maddy replied. “It’s not. I’m not. But someday, I will be.”

  I recognized that as both a promise and a statement of fact. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do, Maddy was going to survive this. I just wished she didn’t have to do it alone.

  I wished that I hadn’t been the one to kill the boy she loved.

  “There’s a stretch of land along the Colorado border,” I said. “Sage’s family lives there. They know. You’d be safe there, and you wouldn’t have to see me—”

  “You’re there, Bryn. You’re everywhere, every day, all the time.” Maddy met my eyes, but it wasn’t a challenge. It was a request, one that told me she was beyond dominance, beyond submission, beyond everything other than the need to get away. “You have to let me go.”

  It took me a moment to realize what she was asking.

  “You want me to let you go,” I repeated. “As in go go?”

  “You’re a part of me, and if I’m going to get through this, I need you not to be.”

  I saw in her eyes that she’d thought this through, that while I’d been lying
in my bed, looking up at my ceiling, she’d been doing the same in hers.

  “If you’re not Cedar Ridge, we can’t protect you. Any alpha who sees you could take you by force and make you theirs.”

  Lone werewolves were dangerous. A lone female was more or less unheard of. The other alphas would hunt her to the ends of the earth if they knew.

  “No one is going to see me,” Maddy said with that same quiet dignity she’d always had. “I’ll stick to No-Man’s-Land. I’ll lie low.”

  I couldn’t let her do this.

  “If you force me to stay, I’ll hate you. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later, I won’t be able to help it anymore, and I’m not going to do that to either of us, Bryn. I’m going to go away, and I am going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.” She paused, her chest heaving with the effort of saying the words. “I don’t want to be that person. Please.”

  She didn’t give me the chance to respond.

  “Being Resilient means having the ability to shake off pack-bonds. I did it with the Rabid. If you force me to, I’ll do it with you. But I’d rather you just …”

  She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and finished the statement in a whisper, from her mind to mine. Let me go.

  I nodded then, because I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes. I reached out and touched her face gently.

  I dragged my nails over the flesh of her neck, lightly leaving my mark.

  And then I let her go.

  The world realigned in an instant, and I did my best to tune out my senses, the ones that recognized what Maddy was now—and what she wasn’t anymore.

  “Anytime you want to come back, you can. No conditions, no questions asked.” I sounded calmer than I felt, and that somehow tricked my brain into thinking I could handle this. “If you get into trouble and can’t or don’t want to come here, go to Colorado.”

  I might not have been sure of much when it came to Callum, but I was sure that he wouldn’t use Maddy the way the other alphas might. She’d be a person and not just a power play to him.

  “Bye, Bryn.”

  Just like that, Maddy was gone.

  For the first time since Lucas’s challenge, I let myself cry.

  I woke up on December 24, looked in the mirror, and made a decision. I didn’t tell anyone, because I knew they would argue with me. I brushed my lips against Chase’s, and his curved upward in response.

  I willed him to keep sleeping.

  I walked toward the door and paused at the dresser, just long enough to look at myself in the mirror one last time and pick a small wooden carving up off the base. I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, helped myself to the keys to Ali’s car, and drove.

  It took hours to reach my destination. I threw the car into park and slipped out of the driver’s seat. Then I walked right up to the edge of the sign—WELCOME TO COLORADO—and I waited.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Callum seemed smaller than I remembered, and he looked younger, right up until we were standing less than two feet apart, and then my eyes adjusted and saw him as they always had.

  For a few seconds, we just looked at each other, poker faces firmly in place, Callum on his side of the border and me on mine.

  “I don’t suppose Ali knows you took off with her car,” he said finally. I would have taken his speaking first as a sign of victory, but I recognized a hint of mischief around the corners of his eyes.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m pretty sure she does, because I’m betting you called and told her.”

  Callum ran a hand over the five o’clock shadow on his face, but the motion couldn’t quite hide his sheepish smile. “Old habits die hard, Bryn.”

  I felt a few “old habits” of my own flaring up. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the carving he’d sent me on Thanksgiving Day, and I slammed it down into his palm.

  “A Trojan horse?” I said. “Seriously, Callum? You saw what was going to happen, you knew, and all you could give me was a cryptic carving whose meaning wouldn’t register until after Shay had sent a ticking time bomb into my ranks?”

  The poker face fell back into place. “I wanted to be there. I wanted to help you, but this was something you needed to do on your own.”

  This tune was already old. “I’m Sorry for It, but I’d Do It Again” was quickly becoming Callum’s theme song.

  “There are things you don’t know, Bryn, things I can’t tell you about the person you’re meant to become.”

  I swallowed the urge to tell him that the next time he could take his cryptic warnings and put them where the sun don’t shine. Instead, I asked him the question I’d come here to ask, the one he’d almost certainly known he would be answering when he drove here to meet me.

  “Will you do it?” I didn’t specify what it was. I didn’t have to.

  A flicker of sadness passed over Callum’s face, and something tender flashed through his eyes, but a moment later, all of that was gone. Callum reached across the border and ran one hand over my head and down the length of my hair, the way he had a million times when I was growing up.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I will.”

  “Now?” I asked, and he let out a bark of laughter that made me wonder exactly what memory from my youth my request had provoked. I’d never exactly been what one would call patient.

  “No,” Callum replied sternly. “Not now. You have some time yet, Bryn-girl. Human time. I’d not have you giving that up.”

  I didn’t like his answer, but there was no one else I could ask to do the unthinkable. Chase and Devon would have refused, Lake would have found a way to beat the tar out of me just for asking, and I didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. If the werewolf who attacked me pulled his punches, all I’d have to show for it would be a boatload of scars, and if he went too far, I’d be dead.

  This wasn’t a science. There were no guarantees. But this was Callum, and if there was one person I trusted to know exactly how much he could hurt me for the greater good, it was him.

  “You won’t tell Ali?” I asked. I’d thought this through, but given that I valued my life, I didn’t think cluing my foster mother in would be a good idea.

  “She’d never forgive me for even considering it,” Callum replied.

  I snorted. “She’s never going to forgive you anyway.”

  “Brat.”

  I accepted the word as a term of endearment but didn’t take that one extra step to cross from my territory into his, and as much as he might have wanted to, he didn’t cross over in my direction, either.

  I had my pack, and he had his. I had my reasons for asking. Knowing Callum, he had his reasons for saying yes.

  Maybe this moment had been inevitable from the day Callum had saved me and taken me in. Maybe he’d always known it would come down to this. Maybe he’d hoped that it wouldn’t.

  In any case, if there was one thing the past month had taught me, it was that the stronger a pack was, the stronger their alpha—and the stronger the alpha, the stronger the pack.

  I wanted my pack to be safe.

  I wanted to be able to protect them.

  I didn’t want a giant target forever drawn on my very human head. What had happened with Lucas wasn’t going to happen again.

  Ever.

  “Merry Christmas, Callum,” I said.

  He smiled and handed me back the carving of the Trojan horse. “Merry Christmas, Bryn.”

  I closed my fingers around the token. I walked back to Ali’s car, buried this entire conversation so deep in my mind that no one else would ever know it had taken place, and drove home.

  Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

  Pack. Pack. Pack.

  Soon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who’s helped this book come to life. Thanks first and foremost to my editor, Regina Griffin, whose keen insights whipped this puppy (no pun intended) into shape and who continually floors me with h
er enthusiasm and love for Bryn and her world. Thanks also to Elizabeth Harding, agent extraordinaire, who keeps me sane—I sleep better at night knowing I have you on my side. To everyone at Egmont USA, who are all among the kindest, funniest, smartest bunch of folks I know, I cannot tell you how lucky I feel to be a part of your pack! And a big thank-you to the team at Quercus, especially Roisin Heycock and Parul Bavishi, for bringing the Raised by Wolves series to the UK and taking such good care of me last fall.

  I would be absolutely lost without my writing friends, who lend an ear on everything from plotting to procrastination. Thanks to Sarah Cross and Melissa Marr for reading early drafts of this book, and to Ally Carter, for being on the other side of the phone line every single day. And a shout-out to the Smart Chicks, my RWA roomies, and Bob!

  As always, I couldn’t do even half of what I do without the love and support of my family. Mom, Dad, Justin, and Allison—you all are the best.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JENNIFER LYNN BARNES has been writing for as long as she can remember, completing her first young adult novel, Golden, at the age of nineteen. She is also the author of Platinum, The Squad series, Tattoo, and Fate. Currently pursuing her PhD in developmental psychology at Yale University, she splits her time between New Haven, Connecticut, and her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You can visit her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com.