Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Finals went well,” I said, keeping my back to the wall, an instinct that I couldn’t shake, even though we were all family here. “I’m pretty sure I aced algebra.”

  I felt Callum smile beside me, but when I looked over at him, his face was neutral, calm. The face of the alpha, taking care of pack business.

  My hands flitted to the waist of my jeans, needing a reminder—a physical reminder—that even when he was alpha, he was still Callum. Even when it came to pack business, I was still his.

  “Is this about my seeing Chase again?” I asked. I was facing Callum, but Ali was the one who answered my words.

  “You don’t have to go. You don’t have to do this.”

  First Devon and now Ali. What did they know that I didn’t?

  “Nothing,” Ali said, and I wondered if my thoughts were always apparent on my face. “I don’t know anything that you don’t, Bryn, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that this could get ugly.”

  “Chase won’t hurt me.”

  Ali glanced at Callum, and Devon’s words floated back to me—It’s not Chase I’m worried about.

  Callum won’t hurt me, either, I thought, but I didn’t broadcast the words. The fact that I had to say or think them at all was mind-boggling. I’d approached Callum as a member of his pack, and his actions and mine were equally bound by our agreement. I knew better than to break faith with our entire pack, and I had more inhibition than they were giving me credit for.

  Tempting fate was one thing; baiting Pack Justice was entirely another.

  “Are you ready?” Callum asked me, ignoring Ali. The look in his eyes told me that he knew me better than she did. He didn’t question, even for a second, the possibility that I’d back down.

  “He’s just a boy,” I said out loud. Just a boy with a Rabid in his head, who claims he loved me before we ever met. “I’m ready.”

  Ali sighed, and the sound was unnatural, like her lungs were being deflated, the air sucked out of them by some external force.

  “Take care of her, Casey,” Ali said, and I couldn’t tell if her words were an order or a plea. “Please.”

  Casey nodded, but not for the first time, I wondered if he’d fully bargained on me when he’d married Ali.

  “I’ll take care with her, Alison. You have my word.” Callum’s words should have been comforting, but as an expert at obfuscation myself, I couldn’t help but notice what he hadn’t said. He hadn’t said that he’d take care of me. He’d said he’d take care with me, and I knew better than to think that those two things were the same.

  Casey, Callum, and I walked toward Callum’s house in silence. Sora and Lance joined us halfway there.

  “You know he’s not just a boy,” I said, feeling the need to explain myself to someone in Ali’s absence.

  “I know,” Callum replied, and I wondered if he meant for me to hear the slight echo of sadness in his tone.

  This visit had nothing to do with Chase being a boy and me being a girl. It had nothing to do with the way he dogged my dreams and haunted my field of vision every time I blinked.

  This was about the Rabid.

  It was about me.

  By the time we got to Callum’s house, I’d stopped trying to explain myself.

  “Casey, Sora, and Lance are dominant. Your pack-bond remains open. You’re not to touch him.” With those words, Callum disappeared, and I wondered again why it was that he couldn’t or wouldn’t stay to watch my interaction with Chase.

  “Hello.”

  Speak of the devil. There was depth to that one word. Even just the sound of Chase’s voice made me think of the full moon, silvery and larger than life.

  “Hello,” I replied, feeling human and small. Someday, I’d run with him, the way I had with the rest of the pack. Not today.

  Within seconds, the two of us were positioned just as we had been the last time, me on the sofa, Chase on a nearby chair. He smiled, and in the curves of his lips, I could almost see his wolf: dark fur, light eyes.

  “Same rules as last time,” Sora said, her impeccably controlled voice breaking into my mind.

  No touching.

  No talking about my family or the way they’d died.

  No asking Chase about the method with which another Rabid had torn him limb from limb.

  “How are you?” I asked, feeling even more muzzled than I had the last time I’d been in his presence.

  “Good,” Chase replied. I’ve got control, he added silently. Nobody in my thoughts but me. Most of the time.

  His voice was clearer in my mind than anyone else’s had ever been, and I knew I wasn’t imagining that there was more than a pack-bond between us. I didn’t feel him in my hip, in Callum’s Mark.

  I felt him in my stomach and in my lungs. I breathed him in and out and saw him in my mind, in memories he’d had no part of the first time around.

  “I had finals today,” I said. The words were insufficient and irrelevant, but as they exited my mouth, my guards relaxed. They didn’t mind me talking to Chase the boy. They just wanted me to stay away from his wolf. Away from the night of its birth, bloody and cruel.

  “I don’t miss finals,” Chase said. “Come to think of it, I don’t really miss people, either.”

  “You don’t miss being human?” I asked. It was one thing to watch the Weres lose their human selves on the day of the full moon, to watch the wolf slowly taking hold of Callum’s body, or Devon’s, but it was another thing altogether to imagine going from being what I was to the thing that Chase was now.

  It could have been me. The thought broadsided me. Chase sat on his chair like a lion lounging on the savannah. Like a wolf, sprawled across wet forest ground. His limbs dangled off the side. His eyes took in everything, flitting between my body and that of my guards.

  It could have been me.

  “I don’t miss being human.” Chase paused, the human holding back words that his wolf wanted him to say. “I miss you.”

  The air between us turned to static, and I felt his pull—magnetic and uncontrollable. On edge between human and not.

  Concentrate, I told myself. I hadn’t come here to picture his life before he’d changed. I hadn’t come here to commune with his wolf or wonder if it was a feeling like this that had coerced generations of human females to leave their families for a chance at dying while giving birth to werewolf pups.

  I’m not that kind of girl, I told Chase silently.

  He shrugged, and I wondered if he even knew what I was talking about, if he had even the vaguest measure of the power calling to my body from his.

  “Callum said not to touch you,” Chase remarked. “You don’t smell like meat anymore.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of either of those observations, but I saw other things in the blue of his eyes: control that hadn’t been there the last time we met. And loneliness, the kind that had no business existing in the middle of a werewolf pack.

  “What happened to the wolf who attacked you?” Every time I wanted to ask him a question about the attack, I asked him about his life instead, and now that I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t alone, the other questions slipped easily off my tongue.

  “He ran off.”

  “Is he dead?” I addressed this question to my guards. “Did we hunt him down?”

  Sora’s response came almost immediately. “You don’t need to concern yourself with that, Bryn.”

  That wasn’t an answer. It was an order. They were ordering me not to concern myself with the Rabid—the reason I’d come here to Chase in the first place.

  “I call him Prancer.” Chase saved me from complete and utter frustration. At least he had the ability and force of will to stay on topic.

  “You call the werewolf who attacked you, almost killed you, and Changed you Prancer?” I asked.

  “I had to stop being scared sometime. Give the boogeyman a name, and he goes away.” Chase shrugged and then continued on in my head. Callum taught me how to keep him out of my
mind, but you can’t change the memories. I sleep, and he’s there. When I dream, he’s got me exactly where he wants me, and there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it. But then I wake up, and he’s Prancer. He can’t control my thoughts. He can’t make me scared. Not without my permission.

  “Is Chase talking to you?” Sora asked me. “Silently?”

  I wasn’t sure how she could tell. Maybe she read it in my change in posture, as my body shifted itself toward him, all of its own accord. Maybe she saw it in my face, or felt it through the pack-bond. In any case, I didn’t want to answer the question, but Sora pushed at me, coming forward and placing her hands on my knees, leaning over me in a way that made me lean back.

  She was dominant. It wasn’t just a word. It wasn’t just a concept. It was real, and at the moment, I couldn’t have lied to her if I’d wanted to, agreement or no. “Yes.”

  “He shouldn’t be able to do that,” Casey said, startled. “Not yet.”

  Sora snorted and looked at me. “Neither should she.”

  They’re going to tell us to stop, I realized.

  And then we’ll have to stop, he replied.

  Neither of us wanted to. I wanted him in my head. I wanted to be in his, and in the second before Sora made the order official, the two of us joined together mentally, images passing from his mind to mine.

  Dark alley.

  Grease stains on his pants.

  Shadows behind him.

  Low, silky voice.

  Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

  My thoughts bled over to his. The man I’d called Daddy. The woman who’d been my mother before Ali. And siblings—I’d had siblings, hadn’t I? And then came the knock at the door, and a man.

  A man with a wolf.

  Man killed Mommy.

  Wolf killed Daddy.

  And then they started looking for me.

  Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

  “Stop it. Both of you. Anything that is said will be said out loud. That’s an order.”

  Radio silence fell between me and Chase, but my head was still a mess of his thoughts and mine and the things I’d shown him, because the orders I’d been given forbade me from talking about them out loud.

  “So,” I said out loud. “Prancer bit you. You survived.”

  “That about covers it.”

  “And I think we’re just about done here,” Sora said.

  “Callum said we had an hour,” I reminded her.

  “Trust my judgment on this one, Bryn. You don’t have much of a choice.”

  It’s for your own good, silly girl.

  I was pretty sure that she didn’t mean for me to hear that.

  “He had a white star on his forehead,” Chase said, and his voice took on the tone of the shadows missing from his eyes. “It was the last thing I saw before I blacked out. Prancer’s star.”

  I was paralyzed, my heart pounding viciously within my frozen body. I was suddenly very aware of my own blood, the way it pumped through my veins, and how easily it would have been for my position and Chase’s to be reversed.

  He had a white star on his forehead.

  Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

  I thought I would throw up, but I didn’t. “They’re the same. Prancer and the Big Bad Wolf.”

  “Bryn,” Sora warned, but that wasn’t an order. It wasn’t. And I didn’t have to listen to it.

  “The man who hurt you and the man who hurt me—”

  “I told you not to talk about that, Bryn.” That, from Casey, who seemed terrified of giving me another order, for fear that I would disobey.

  I’d promised Ali, and so had he. I wouldn’t do anything stupid. Casey wouldn’t let me get hurt. But I was hurt.

  I was hurting.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.…

  And then they were there in my head. The pack. All of them—they were there, tugging at my psyche, drowning out Chase, willing me to submit, to take my place, to be their daughter, their sister.

  Controllable.

  Their pawn.

  I’ll be fine, I’d promised Ali. I won’t do anything stupid, I’d sworn to Devon. But they hadn’t known—I couldn’t believe for a second that either of them had known the full truth of what Callum had been hiding from me these past few months. He hadn’t just been keeping me away from Chase, making me work myself to the bone for a few minutes in his presence.

  He hadn’t been preparing me for anything.

  He’d been masking the big picture, hiding the truth. I could feel my body going numb, my brain detaching from it, as the ball of things I’d once been exploded in my mind, drowning out everything else. The man who’d attacked Chase and the one who’d killed my family were one and the same. It was eight kinds of impossible, and every single one of them urged me forward.

  Fight.

  I could fight this. I could fight everything Callum had forced on me in the name of keeping me safe. I could pull against the leash choking me back, the orders Sora was yelling at me.

  Trapped.

  A familiar haze descended on me. Uncontrollable. Unknowable.

  Trapped.

  Fight.

  Blood.

  “This meeting is over,” Sora said, reaching for my arm, and that was the last straw. She couldn’t touch me. Not to keep me from Chase. Not to keep me from thinking thoughts that the pack didn’t want me to think.

  Not to keep me from the truth.

  Not now. Not ever.

  Obey. Obey. Obey.

  Submit. Submit. Submit.

  My pack-sense went into overload, but when Sora tried to haul me to my feet, she made a critical error, because there was only one thing stronger than my tie to the pack, and that was the drive to be safe. To escape.

  I sensed him coming. I sensed him coming, and I ran, and I hid.

  And now Sora’s hand was on my shoulder, and they’d lied to me. All of them. My peripheral vision went first, and then the darkness circled in, red and rough, like blood splattered on the wall, as I watched from under the sink.

  Obey. Fight. Trapped. Submit.

  Survive.

  There was the order that mattered. The only one. I leapt from the couch, the darkness closing in all around me, and my guards were so surprised at the show of outright disobedience that they didn’t react quickly enough. Not quickly enough to press their will onto mine, or quickly enough to keep me from bashing through one order after another after another, with the fury and ferocity of an animal cornered and caged.

  I leapt at Chase, barreling toward him, and he caught me and held on so tight that I could feel my arms bruising, but it didn’t matter.

  We were touching.

  They’d told us not to touch, and we were touching.

  My parents got bit. They didn’t survive. Callum killed the wolf who did it before he got to me. Only I guess he didn’t. Kill him. Not really.

  More passing between us. Feelings: anger-hate-fear-love-hope, words, and scattered images. I was in Chase’s mind. He was in mine. I couldn’t see a thing. Not even his face.

  Trapped. Fight. They’re going to take me away. Have to—have to—

  Sora, Lance, and Casey jumped to their feet—I couldn’t see them, too red, too much red—and Chase pulled me closer. “Mine,” he growled.

  “Let her go.”

  “No,” I said, forcing my body to follow my commands, grinding my jaw and forcing the world to settle back into place in front of my eyes. “Don’t.”

  Everything I’d known my entire life was a lie. The person—the monster—who’d killed my family was still out there, and Callum knew. He knew and he’d kept it from me, kept Chase from me—not because he was dangerous, not because of the Rabid in his mind.

  Because together, we would have figured it out.

  “Let her go. Now.”

  The air crackled with Lance’s dominance. I hadn’t realized how strong he was, how close to alpha himself, and the fact that he rarely spoke gave his words mo
re power than they would have had otherwise. Chase’s wolf responded to the order, pausing, growling, backing down.

  His fingers loosened around my arms.

  OBEY. OBEY. OBEY.

  It was overwhelming. Suffocating. Crushing. I felt Chase’s panic, and somehow, that rid me of mine. My vision was perfect, because his was becoming cloudy. My thoughts weren’t scrambled, because his were.

  Trapped, I could hear him thinking. Fight. Bryn.

  I recognized the madness, saw him losing control, bit by bit and piece by piece, and I remembered what I’d done to Devon when I’d lost myself to a similar directive. When I’d been trapped with nowhere else to go.

  If he attacked Lance, they’d kill him.

  Fight.

  I couldn’t lose myself to the adrenaline, the need to get the two of us out of there and away. One of us had to stay in control.

  It had to be me.

  Look at me, I thought, fighting back my haze and his. Only at me, Chase.

  I could have shut down my bond to the pack, could have put back up some excuse for a mental block, but I didn’t. Instead, my body threatening to seize with the effort it took to keep my basest, most vicious instincts from taking over, I gathered everything that existed between me and the pack, everything that made me one of them, every invisible tendril that tied me to my wolf-brothers, and I shoved it toward Chase.

  Mine, I thought.

  Trapped. Fight. Survive.

  Mine.

  There was a whoosh, like all of the air had been instantaneously sucked out of the room, and then there was silence, the pack roaring at me from a great distance, unheard. Silence.

  Silence, and Chase.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?” CASEY’S WORDS WERE sharp, but the expression on his face was closer to horrified. “What did the two of you do?”

  Chase looked at Casey and then at me. My panic and Chase’s were gone, and in its place, there was something dynamic and warm weaving its way through my body and through his, pulling us together, inch by inch.

  “I don’t have to answer,” Chase said, puzzled. “Normally, when they ask me something, I have to answer.” He flicked his head to the side. “It’s there, still. I can feel them. Callum. Wolf. Pack. I can almost hear them, but it’s different.” He leaned forward and buried his nose in my hair, breathing me in. “It’s you.”