Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I was almost to the door by then, and the urge to go back, to go to him, was overpowering.

  Obey. Obey. Obey.

  If I wanted to see Chase again, I had to obey now, and Sora had told me to leave. Slowly, I brought my hand up to the doorknob.

  Bryn? Chase’s voice was a whisper in my mind, and the sensation sent a single chill up my spine.

  Yes?

  You asked what I liked, before. He paused, and the silence tickled my mind, the chill in my spine climbing its way to the hairs on the back of my neck. Before, I loved cars, Yeats, having a bedroom that locked from the inside, and you.

  His words exploded in my brain, and if Casey hadn’t had a hold on me, I would have stumbled.

  You didn’t even know me then. The part of me that still thought like a human would have rolled my human eyes at Chase’s declaration that he’d known me long before we’d ever met, but my pack-sense wouldn’t let me. Because deep down, Chase was Pack. He and I were the same, and there were situations in which you couldn’t expect a wolf—Were or otherwise—to understand the concept of time.

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I opened the door and stepped outside, directly into Callum. I wasn’t sure when he’d gone out, or how much he’d been listening, only that he was waiting for me. Callum closed his arms around me, pulled me tight to his body, and held me the way Lance had held Chase—like I needed his support to stay vertical. Until I fell into his grasp, I hadn’t realized just how close I’d followed Chase to the edge of something dangerous and scary.

  I loved cars, Yeats, having a bedroom that locked from the inside, and you.

  How willing I was, already, to go back.

  “You did a good job,” Callum told me.

  Alpha, my pack-sense said in return.

  Callum, I thought. But there was a part of my mind that was thinking something else. Thinking about someone else.

  Chase.

  “You’re all right. You’re safe. You’ll see him again.” Callum’s voice was gruff, but to me, his words sounded like a lullaby, and my legs shook, threatening to turn to jelly beneath me.

  Chase wasn’t in control. Not fully. Not yet. And the man who’d done this to him, the monster who’d changed him, was still lurking in the recesses of his mind, the same way that each and every member of our pack was in the corners of mine.

  “You’re all right. You’re safe. You’ll see him again.”

  Alpha. Callum. Guardian. Pack.

  The unspoken words all told me the exact same thing—Chase would be okay. Callum wouldn’t give up the fight, wouldn’t let the Rabid take one of ours. Alpha meant safety. Callum was safe—and so long as I kept up my end of the agreement, followed his orders, didn’t run back to Chase and close the space between us, so was I.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FOR WEEKS AFTERWARD, THOUGHTS OF CHASE dogged my every step. It didn’t matter what I was doing—running with Callum, sparring with Sora or Lance—Chase was always there, his blue eyes flecked with the incomprehensible. I saw him lying in the cage, the way he had that first night. I saw him on his knees, held down by Lance’s stone-hard fists. I saw him the way he must have looked walking home from work on the day the Rabid systematically tore him to shreds.

  He’d been human once.

  He should have died.

  And each time I imagined him, thought about seeing him again, I was reminded of the fact that I should have died, too. Jagged, uneven bits of that long-ago night worked their way into my consciousness, and like the pieces of a puzzle, I assembled them.

  Someone had knocked on my parents’ door. I’d run to answer, but hadn’t. I’d stepped back. Mommy had rushed past me.

  I’d stepped back again.

  Blood. Splattering.

  There were still pieces missing. I couldn’t remember what my father had looked like. I couldn’t remember the length of my mother’s white dress. All I could remember was the man who’d turned into a gray wolf, the white star on his forehead, the blood.

  Running.

  Hiding.

  Air hot in my throat. Burning my lungs. Panic.

  I remembered pressing back farther and farther in the cabinet under the sink. I remembered the Bad Man’s words.

  Quiet. I remembered being so quiet, and then—nothing, but a red haze. An instinct.

  Blood.

  Beside me, Devon looked up from his paper and tilted his head to one side.

  You okay? I read the words in his expression, felt them in the pull of his pack-bond at mine, but I didn’t actually hear his voice in my mind. I hadn’t heard anyone’s, not even Callum’s.

  Not since Chase.

  Not that I’d heard Chase, either. I’d resisted the urge to go looking for him, to close my eyes and sort my way through the mass of interconnected psychic bonds that was Stone River until I found him.

  I was being a good little pack daughter, doing everything Callum asked me to. I’d been biding my time, until he’d allow me to see Chase again.

  Blood. Splattering. Burnt hair and men’s cologne.

  It was all messed up in my mind—Chase and the Rabid who’d turned him, Callum and the Rabid he’d killed the night the rest of my family had died. Stone River. Foreign wolves.

  Running and losing myself to the overwhelming, indescribable force of us.

  I’m fine. I sent Devon the message in feelings, not words, but the set of his jaw—not a single, easy grin in sight—told me that he didn’t believe me. I made my best effort at a smile, and with a look that told me that Devon had absolutely no respect for my nonexistent acting chops and that we would be talking about this later, he turned his attention back to his own desk, and I did the same.

  Failing my algebra final would probably be ill-advised.

  May had come and gone too quickly, and the sheet of paper on my desk was the only thing standing between me and summer. Standing between me and Chase, who’d been working with Callum to force the taint of the Rabid out of his head.

  Tomorrow, Bryn. Right after school.

  That was the sum total of what Callum had said to me the day before, but it was all I’d needed to hear, and if Chase had been on my mind these past weeks, he was in it now.

  Before, I loved cars, Yeats, having a bedroom that locked from the inside, and you.

  Whether it was my bond with the pack or the fact that he was the first boy to ever haunt my dreams, I couldn’t say, but as the days passed and I didn’t see him, I started to feel more and more like Chase’s words were true. Like I’d always known him.

  Like we were the same.

  Which was ridiculous and silly and less than no help when it came to graphing the equation for y = sin x.

  Forcing all other thoughts out of my mind, I worked my way through the exam. I willed the numbers to make sense. I matched the sheer force of my will against the power of partial credit, and I forced it to submit.

  I forced it to cave.

  I dominated that test, the way I couldn’t dominate anything or anyone else.

  Tomorrow, Bryn. Right after school.

  Those five words were all it had taken for Callum to transform from the man who’d promised Ali he’d take care of me to the one who made no guarantees about my safety if I took a single step out of line.

  I was Pack and I’d act like it.

  I’d submit.

  If my last visit had been any indication, the pack wouldn’t let me get too close to Chase. Wouldn’t risk my asking questions the answers to which they either didn’t want him to give or didn’t want me to know.

  Maybe both.

  I knew my Rabid was coming. I knew he was bad. I was trapped and I was scared and I ran. Hid.

  Was that what it had been like for Chase?

  Was that what it would always be like for me?

  “Five minutes,” our teacher announced from the front of the room, and then, just to clarify the point, he wrote the number 5 in a big loopy scrawl on the chalkboard. On my right, Devon had already started
checking his answers. On my left, Jeff of the motorcycle incident had simply given up, opting instead for staring at the sweet, quiet girl who’d dumped him not long after he’d given her my pen.

  I stopped writing with forty-five seconds to spare, and even though I didn’t have time to double-check my calculations, I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d aced it. I certainly should have. On late, sleepless nights, the memory of the Big Bad Wolf waiting for me in dreams, there’d been nothing to do but study algebra and think of Chase.

  He’d grown up in the foster-care system.

  He’d been angry for as long as he could remember.

  He appreciated the power of privacy—or had before he’d turned.

  He was a living, walking impossibility.

  And he was mine.

  Pack. Not Pack. Pack. Not Pack.

  “Time’s up!”

  The teacher sounded way too perky for someone who typically took pleasure in our dismay, but given the fact that his summer vacation started the second that ours did, I didn’t suppose I could blame him. Once upon a time, summer had meant running around barefoot with Devon and a visit from the only female werewolf anywhere near our age. I could feel it in my bones that this summer was going to be different.

  I wasn’t ready.

  As the teacher came by to collect my exam, I had a single moment of insanity, during which I fought the urge to hold on to my paper. If I didn’t turn in the test, it wasn’t really summer yet.

  If it wasn’t summer, I wasn’t going to see Chase again.

  And if I didn’t see Chase again, I wouldn’t have to worry about what he might say. What I might find out. What I might remember.

  What I might do.

  “Ms. Clare?”

  The teacher sounded so befuddled that I loosened my grip on the exam and let him have it. Beside me, Devon grinned.

  “Did you pass?” he asked, as we gathered our bags and headed for the door.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Come on, Bryn—my summer plans are just as subject to your state of groundedness as yours are. Did you pass?”

  With my luck, Dev’s summer plans probably involved attempting to organize a werewolf theater festival. I shuddered to think of the number of roles I’d have to play when the surplus of males in the pack refused to don curly blonde wigs and play girls in the tradition of the original Shakespearean plays.

  “I passed,” I said. “And for the record, I haven’t agreed to any of your so-called plans yet.”

  With Devon, things were easy. Besides Ali, he was the only one I could look at without thinking of the rest of the pack.

  “You don’t have to go, you know,” Devon said, his voice uncharacteristically understated. “If you decide you don’t want to, if you’d—for instance—rather hitch a ride into Denver and have a night on the town such as only I can show you …”

  My look stopped Devon mid-sentence.

  “Sorry. It’s just … you smell like him.” Devon said the words lightly, but a muscle in his jaw tensed. “You haven’t seen him in weeks, you didn’t touch him, and you still smell like him.”

  That was news to me. Self-consciously, I sniffed at my own arm, and a couple of town girls glanced at me and snickered. They probably thought I was checking myself for BO.

  “I don’t smell anything,” I told Devon, ignoring the townies.

  Devon didn’t reply—he just twirled his pen around his fingers like a tiny, ink-filled baton. “Come on,” he tried again. “You. Me. Netflix.”

  He was every bit as bad as Ali, pulling me back from the edge just before I dove headfirst into the abyss below.

  Screw the townies, I thought, and giving them a real show, I butted my head gently against Devon’s chest, and he rested his chin on the top of my skull.

  “You know I’m going,” I said, speaking directly into his shoulder.

  He sighed, once quietly and once with the melodrama I’d come to expect from him. “Yes. I know. Nobody puts Baby in the corner, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah.”

  The fact that he could attach not one but two “blah”s on the end of a Dirty Dancing quote conveyed the true depths of his sour mood.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Devon didn’t reply.

  “Chase wouldn’t hurt me.” Even if Chase lost it, even if Callum and the Rabid were duking it out for dominance in his head, if I’d gotten under Chase’s skin half as much as he’d gotten under mine, I’d be fine.

  Devon said his next words so quietly that I almost didn’t catch them. “It’s not Chase I’m worried about.”

  I tried to make him repeat himself, but he wouldn’t, and that, more than anything, told me that the person Devon was worried about wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Chase.

  It was Callum.

  “You can’t honestly be worried about that,” I told Dev, but even as the words left my mouth, I sensed his wolf stirring.

  Females were to be protected, but the alpha was to be obeyed.

  “Callum would never hurt me.” That had been my litany since the moment he’d rescued me from under the sink. Crooned to me. Talked to me. Banished the haze.

  “If you break your permissions, he won’t have a choice.”

  I jabbed my fist into Devon’s stomach hard enough to knock the air out of a normal boy. He didn’t respond at all.

  “I’m not going to break the conditions,” I said. “I didn’t last time. I’m not stupid.”

  That statement was met with rather insulting silence.

  “I followed instructions last time, didn’t I?”

  More silence, and then, finally, Devon broke into a song from Annie.

  “ ‘Hard Knock Life,’ ” I said. “Seriously?”

  Devon shrugged, but I noticed that he didn’t step away from me, like his wolf thought that if they just stayed close enough to me, I’d be okay.

  “Trust me, Dev. I’ll be fine.”

  My words must have sounded like truth, because he backed off, but in the depths of my brain, I wondered if the future would make a liar out of me. Because the last time I saw Chase, I wasn’t fine. I didn’t break permissions. I didn’t force Callum’s hand.

  Chase hadn’t laid a finger on me.

  But I hadn’t been fine.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are, little one. No sense in hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. I’ll always find you in the end.…

  The only way I was going to be fine—now or ever—was when I knew exactly what had happened to Chase, and knew that it wasn’t going to happen to anyone else.

  Ever.

  Again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD PRETEND FOR A SINGLE second that you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen!”

  “Alison—”

  “Don’t you ‘Alison’ me, Callum. You want to talk conditions, what were my conditions?”

  “Ali—”

  I recognized the voices from twenty yards away: Ali, Callum, and Casey. They were yelling so loudly that they didn’t even seem to be aware of my approach, which was really something, because I wasn’t making any attempt to mask the sound of my footsteps, and Callum and Casey should have heard me coming from a mile off.

  “This is between me and Callum, Casey. If you can’t back me up, keep your mouth closed.”

  Ali’s voice lowered in volume, and I gulped on Casey’s behalf. If she’d been using that tone with me, I would have turned tail and run, no questions asked.

  “I don’t know why I even—”

  A low, unidentifiable sound, issued from Callum’s throat, stopped Casey’s words in their tracks. I wasn’t sure if Callum had growled in warning or in threat, but either way, Casey didn’t finish what was probably an entirely inadvisable sentence.

  I don’t know why I even bother?

  I don’t know why I even try?

  I don’t know why I even act like there’s the smallest chance you might listen to me?

  It didn’t matter. Even I co
uld tell that Ali wasn’t in the mood to hear any of the above. She was challenging Callum. Casey was trying to get her to back off. Our house had somehow become Dominance Issue Central, and I had a sinking suspicion that it was my fault.

  Casey was mad at Ali. Ali was furious with Callum. And Callum was talking in low, even tones, like he couldn’t have forced both of them to their knees in under a second if he’d taken it in his head to do so.

  This wasn’t good.

  I stopped walking. I stopped breathing. I didn’t move.

  “I left my family behind. I left my friends. I never contacted any of them again. I kept the pack’s secrets, and what did you give me in return?” This wasn’t a rhetorical question. Ali was waiting for an answer, and Callum replied, his voice gentle, like he was reprimanding a child instead of facing down the rage of a mama bear. “I gave you Bryn.”

  “She’s mine, Callum. Not yours. Not the pack’s. She’s my daughter, and you swore to me that when it came to her safety, my word would be law, so whatever you know, whatever you’ve seen—”

  And then, there was silence, so abrupt that I wondered for a second if I’d lost consciousness or gone spontaneously deaf in both ears.

  “You might as well come in,” Callum called, disabusing me of that notion. His voice was dry, like he should have known I’d be hovering at the perimeter of their argument, marking every word. “This concerns you.”

  I heard Ali mutter something under her breath but couldn’t make out what. Slowly, deliberately, I made my way to the house, taking my time with each step, not sure I wanted to see the looks on any of their faces.

  I was right to worry.

  Ali looked like Ali, Callum like Callum, and Casey looked like he wanted to kill me.

  Like any of this was my fault. For once, I hadn’t done anything. Yet.

  “How were your finals?” Ali asked, breaking the silence with a question that sounded so normal that I wondered for an instant if I’d imagined their yelling a moment before.

  A glance at Casey out the side of my eye told me that I hadn’t.