Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Knowing what the torn tank top meant, I knelt to the ground and looked for confirmation. I didn’t have to look far.

  Paw prints.

  “She Shifted.”

  The mild voice took me by surprise. I’d been so caught up in tracking Lake that I hadn’t noticed someone else tracking me.

  Mitch had the grace not to mention just how easy that task had been. “Lake just needs to run it out for a bit. She’ll head for the mountains, always does. ’Bout halfway there, she’ll turn back.”

  It was already getting dark outside.

  “Don’t you worry about her, Bryn. I’ve never seen a girl for running like that one. For that matter, haven’t seen many wolves even half as fast. She’ll be back by sunrise. Always is.”

  “Why’s she running?” I asked, slipping into the gentle cadence of Mitch’s ambling tone.

  “Senate’s coming through,” Mitch commented, sounding for all the world like he was commenting on the weather. Storm’s comin’. It’ll pass.

  “But what does the Senate meeting have to do with Lake?” I asked.

  Mitch stared at my face, long and hard, taking measure of whatever he saw there before speaking again. “Nothin’ that I know of. I suspect they’ll be talking about this Rabid the two of you have been nosing around at all afternoon.”

  And here I’d thought that getting away from Callum meant that I’d have some privacy—and the chance to get the drop on someone, every once in a while.

  “Is Callum psychic?” The question slipped off my tongue before I’d even thought about asking it.

  “Psychic?” Mitch repeated, biting back a smile that made me feel younger than I was. “Not a word you hear much in our world, Bryn.”

  By some definitions, we were all psychic. Pack-bonds connected the Stone River wolves to each other, to their wives, and to me. I could speak to pack members without opening my mouth, and for the past two nights, Chase and I had shared dreams.

  We’d pulled the image of a girl from the mind of the Rabid.

  “Does Callum know that things are going to happen before they happen?” I asked, rephrasing the question in terms of specifics, as Ali’s question to me in the car floated back into my mind: How many times have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone?

  “Callum’s got good instincts,” Mitch said.

  “The kind of instincts that let him see the future?” All of a sudden, I had to know. How it worked. How much Callum knew.

  If he’d done this to me on purpose.

  “Let’s just say he has a knack for knowing what’s going to happen before it does and leave it at that.”

  “A knack?” I snorted. “Like you have a knack for turning into a wolf?”

  Mitch ignored my sarcasm. “Something like that.”

  “Is it because he’s an alpha?”

  “No.”

  “Is it because he’s a Were?”

  “No.” Mitch put his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s just a knack, Bryn. Some people have ’em. Most don’t.”

  He made it sound so simple. So matter-of-fact that I wondered why it had never occurred to me before.

  “Some people are fast. Some people are strong.” Mitch grinned. “Some people are just real easy to talk to.”

  I recognized that grin and knew it meant something. He was teasing me. Real easy to talk to …

  “Keely,” I said, my mind spinning. Lake and I had told her what we were doing without even meaning to. The peripheral male who’d warned us the other alphas were coming hadn’t spilled the beans about Callum’s reputed power until Keely had come over to pour my coffee, brushed her shoulder against his, and then, he couldn’t tell us everything we wanted to know fast enough.

  No wonder Mitch had a human bartender, if that bartender had a knack for getting secrets out of anyone who passed through.

  Knacks. Some people have them. Most don’t.

  I saw the next question coming a mile off. I took my time asking it, because I didn’t want to sound as ridiculous as I had when I’d called Callum psychic. “Do I have one?”

  Mitch shrugged. “You’d know that better than I would.”

  I thought of fighting Devon. Of hiding under the sink. Of forcing my pack-bond onto Chase.

  Of fighting back the Rabid in his head.

  Was that something? Or was I just lucky and stubborn and everything that any human Marked by an alpha and raised by werewolves would have been?

  For his part, Mitch reached out and patted my shoulder as if he were consoling me for all of the knacks I didn’t have. “Way I see it, Bryn, you’ve always been mighty scrappy.”

  Scrappy? Scrappy?

  Some people could see the future. Some people could loosen other people’s lips just by looking at them. And me?

  I was scrappy.

  Lucky me.

  “Will the alphas stop in the restaurant on their way through?” I asked.

  Mitch’s smile hardened. “Some will.”

  “Will Keely … use her knack?” The phrasing sounded ridiculous, but I wasn’t sure how else to put it.

  Mitch took my meaning and shook his head. “Keely’ll take tomorrow off. I’ll man the restaurant myself.”

  I got the feeling he didn’t want any of the alphas to know about Keely or what she could do. Especially since the Wayfarer played host to some of their peripherals.

  “And Lake?” I asked. I still didn’t understand why she was running or what exactly she was running from.

  “Those alphas won’t see hide or hair of Lake, Bryn. She’ll stay far enough away, they won’t even smell her.”

  There was something in his tone that made me think that if Lake hadn’t been inclined to stay away on her own, he’d have seen to it that she did. Given my own mixed feelings about the Senate, I understood the impulse, but not the hardness around Mitch’s eyes.

  “Why?”

  Mitch sighed, and I wondered if he’d tell me I asked too many questions. Finally, he looked down at the ground and then, as if his shoes had given him the answer, he turned back to me. “Some Weres, especially the dominant ones, get real funny around females, and Lake’s not a kid anymore.”

  Our pack had three females. Sora, who was mated to Lance. Katie, who was a baby.

  And Lake.

  “Usually isn’t too bad, unless there are a bunch of men and only one female,” Mitch continued.

  But of course, in our world, that was the way it always was. Most Weres took human mates. Whoever ended up with Lake wouldn’t have to worry that she’d die in childbirth. If she married a werewolf, her children would be pure-blooded Weres.

  “She’s fifteen,” I said.

  Mitch nodded. “That she is.” He didn’t say anything else, and I felt an overwhelming urge to change the subject and an abject inability to do so. After a long, torturous silence, Mitch patted my shoulder again and then shoved me back toward the restaurant.

  “It’s almost dark, and if I know Ali, she’ll be worrying.”

  Just like Mitch would, waiting for Lake to come back.

  “Go on,” he said gently. “Git.”

  With one last glance at the forest and Lake’s shredded clothes, I did as I was bid, and got.

  When I got home, Ali didn’t harass me about what I’d been doing all day, because I preempted any questions on her part by throwing some of my own at her.

  “Did you know Callum sees the future?”

  Ali opened her mouth and then closed it again. “Mitch?” she said finally, her mouth settling into a tense, straight line that told me she’d be giving him a piece of her mind in the near future.

  “Peripheral from another pack,” I said, figuring that I’d save Mitch a confrontation or two.

  Ali nodded and after a few seconds of silence, she spoke, “I’ve always known. Callum told me the day I decided to join the pack.”

  “Before or after you decided to join?” I asked.

  Ali didn’t answer me, and I read t
he meaning in that. Callum had put his cards on the table and told Ali he saw the future before she’d chosen to become a part of his pack. The only reason he would have done that was if something he’d seen played a pivotal role in causing her to stay.

  “What did he see?” I asked her.

  Ali shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I changed it. It didn’t happen.”

  “Ali?”

  But she wouldn’t budge, and I filed the exchange away as a mystery for another time. Right now, I had other questions. “Did everybody but me know?” I asked, trying not to sound as put out as I felt. Ali had earned herself a few buys. I’d given her enough venom she didn’t deserve over the past few months to forgive her for keeping this a secret.

  The rest of the pack, however, was another story.

  “Most of the oldest wolves know,” Ali said. “None of the wives do. Devon doesn’t.”

  She knew me well enough to know that Dev was the one who mattered the most.

  “I take it Lake knows now?” Ali continued.

  “Maybe.”

  Had Lake even heard that part of Tom’s confession? The moment he’d mentioned that foreign alphas would be passing through the Wayfarer, she’d gone quiet and pale.

  “The Senate is meeting,” I said.

  “Senate,” Ali scoffed, purely out of reflex. “There’s nothing democratic about werewolves. Nothing.”

  She was right. This meeting would be like throwing a bunch of champion gladiators into a ring and telling them to talk out their differences over tea. A democracy sounded good in theory, but every time the Senate met, it threatened to be the last.

  All it would take is one alpha to decide that he was above it. Below it. Whatever. One dominant wolf curious to see if he could force his will on one of the others, absorb that territory into his own. Grow his pack’s numbers and power by taking someone else’s.

  By force.

  “Lake’s gone,” I said, thinking of those same men and the way the thought of them had sent her running—not because she was running away, but for the same reasons I’d forced myself to race her to the dock. To prove I was faster. Stronger. Tougher than anyone thought I was.

  Even me.

  “Gone?” Ali was startled. “Gone where? Does Mitch know?”

  I nodded. “She Shifted and took off for the mountains.” It was easy to picture Lake running. She was a honey-blonde wolf, a color you never would have seen in nature, and she was fierce. If I’d wanted to, I probably could have reached for her through my pack-bond, but I knew when to leave well enough alone.

  When Lake was ready to talk about it, she’d come back.

  “The Senate,” Ali said, and this time, her voice was tighter. Less sarcastic, more pained. “Some of them will have to pass through here to get to Callum. I take it Callum is the one who called them?”

  Callum was more or less the only one who ever called the Senate. The others were content to live as kings in their own territories. He was the one who’d declared them a council. This whole democracy thing was his idea. Given what I knew now about his so-called knack, I had to wonder if there was a reason for that move.

  Callum never did anything without a reason.

  “Lake doesn’t want to see anyone who passes through,” I said, refusing to think about Callum any more than I had to. “Mitch says male werewolves can get weird around females.”

  Ali’s silence wasn’t a surprised one. She’d known, then. I probably should have figured it out when Lake’s visits to Ark Valley had become fewer and further apart, the older we got.

  “Nobody will touch Lake without Callum’s say-so,” Ali said. “Not unless they’ve lost their minds.”

  Considering that Lake and I were currently tracking a Rabid, that was less than comforting. Disturbing, too, was the idea that some of the other alphas might be unstable enough to fall under the same classification, at least where female werewolves were concerned.

  “Callum wouldn’t let anyone hurt her,” I said.

  Ali tried to hide her incredulous look, but I saw it anyway, the way her mouth twisted to the side and her eyes widened, reminding me that he’d done more than let Sora hurt me.

  He’d told her to do it.

  “Callum’s more of a big-picture person, Bryn.” Ali’s voice was soft, and I got that she was trying to be gentle with me, trying to make me understand the situation in a way that would hurt me less, even though she had no desire to understand it herself. “Sometimes, for the future he wants, the details have to give.”

  The details. Like me.

  “I’m going to go,” I said. “To my room. It’s been a long day.”

  Ali nodded. “Love you, kiddo.”

  “I love you, too.”

  By the time I got to my room, I needed something to do—half so I could stop thinking about Callum and his so-called knack, and half so I wouldn’t start thinking about the fact that this wasn’t my room.

  The map provided a convenient distraction. I spread it out over my bed and stood on my knees over it. There had to be some pattern to the killing. If I’d had a ruler, I would have measured the distance between each of the kills. Instead, I played connect the dots, drawing a line from the first attack—the one against my parents—to the next chronologically, and then the next. I stopped when I got to Chase’s, and still, there weren’t any answers.

  There were more attacks in the West and Midwest than in the East. More in the North than in the South. But that still left a quarter of the country.

  A quarter that was divided among alphas, none of whom would have tolerated a lone wolf, let alone a Rabid, on their land.

  Maybe if he was at the edges of the territory? I thought. Things were certainly different at the Wayfarer than they were in Ark Valley. Using the same pen, I drew an outline over each of the territories. Callum had Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah were part of Desert Night territory. Snake Bend zigzagged from Arkansas up to to Wisconsin, looping back down for Illinois.

  As I finished tracing Shay’s territory, I paused, looking closer at the map. It was the kind that had geographical information on it as well as official boundaries: rivers, mountains, that kind of thing. I thought briefly of Lake, running for something she wouldn’t reach, but then I forced myself to concentrate.

  Callum had been in America longer than Colorado had been a state. I grappled with my memory, grasping at straws. Somewhere in my “surviving pack life” lessons, there’d been pack history.

  Rivers. Mountains. Lakes.

  That was it. Once upon a time, territories hadn’t been drawn along state lines. They’d been drawn along natural ones, and I remembered—almost remembered, couldn’t remember—something.

  Something Callum had told me about the borders of our territory. Of all territories.

  I forced myself to close my eyes. I pictured Callum and ignored the stinging in my throat. The phrase, if I could just remember the phrase …

  No-Man’s-Land.

  Triumph was sweet, the aftertaste bitter. I couldn’t have been older than six or seven when Callum had told me about it. There were places where the natural cutoffs didn’t line up well with state lines. A tiny slice of one state might be cut off from the rest of a territory by a river or by mountains. Hardly worth fighting over, but fighting was what Weres did about territory disputes, so in certain cases …

  The alphas had a gentlemen’s agreement to leave the land alone.

  The answer was so obvious that if I’d been any older during Callum’s little tutorial, I would have berated myself for not thinking of it sooner. With a smile, I took my pen and circled the tiny slices of the map that fell between boundaries, grateful that I’d managed to remember and that Callum had told me in the first place.

  In retrospect, though, it seemed like a weird thing to teach a kid who just wanted to learn how to tell a few lies and not get eaten.

  Sitting back, I examined my work. It wasn’t a
n answer. There were five relevant pockets of land that fell in the center of the Rabid’s attacks, each one so small that they weren’t labeled with any city names on the map. Now, I just needed to figure out which one the Rabid was using as his base of operations.

  A funny feeling wormed its way through my insides. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar to what I’d felt the night I’d run with the pack, or the starburst of determination in my brain when I’d realized that I needed to touch Chase, even if it meant breaking every rule.

  I was a predator, tracking her prey. I was hunting, the same way Weres took down smaller game.

  “I don’t need to hunt this Rabid.” I said the words out loud, trying to convince myself that they were true. Even if I knew where he was, killing him wasn’t my job. I wasn’t as well equipped to do it as Callum and the other alphas were, and this was what they were meeting about.

  The last time I’d rushed into something, things hadn’t ended well. I thought of Ali in the other room, thought of everything she’d given up for me. If I got myself killed, she’d be the furthest thing from okay, and the twins needed their mother.

  I had to wait. I had to let the Senate take care of this. If they knew what I knew, that this Rabid had been hunting on all of their lands, they’d want to take care of him as badly as I did. Any werewolf with even a lick of sense knew that challenging an alpha on his own turf was a good way to get yourself dead.

  I looked back at the map, and thought back to the words I’d sworn to Lake. If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.

  Until and unless that happened, I needed to get rid of this feeling. I needed to step back, even if the part of me that had grown up Pack felt like stepping away from a kill was wrong. You didn’t come between a wolf and his prey, but I forced myself to let go of mine. Folding up the map, I wondered if I should share what I’d managed to uncover so far. I had no way of knowing if any of it was valid. No way of knowing how much of it—or how much more—Callum and the other alphas already knew.