Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Callum, who had a knack for seeing the future. Just like Keely had a knack for getting people to open their mouths, and I had a knack for getting out of sticky situations. A knack, like this Rabid’s, for not ending up dead.

  “But I don’t want to talk about Callum,” the Rabid said, unwilling to lose my attention in the middle of his grand reveal. “I want to talk about us. Do you have any idea how special you are? How rare?”

  Did it matter? Did I care if I was one in ten thousand, or one in a million?

  “I’m resilient,” I said. “I survive things that others wouldn’t. I bounce back. I’m hard to kill.”

  “Is that all you think this is, Bryn? Do you really think that it’s just you? That you’re just so tough that you come out on top? Come now. Think. Tell me, haven’t you ever felt it, creeping up your spine? Whispering to you. Taking over your limbs, your sight, your fear, your rage …”

  Wilson spoke about his survival instinct like it was a separate being. Like it was sacred. Like he wasn’t a madman reveling in violence so much as the avatar for something primal and cruel. “We’re chosen. Tell me you don’t feel it. Tell me you don’t sense it when you look at me, when you look at the boy that I sent you.”

  Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had attacked him and left him bleeding on the pavement, knowing that he was leaving the carnage in Stone River territory and that Callum would clean up the mess. Knowing that sooner or later, if Chase was a part of Callum’s pack, the two of us would meet.

  Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had sent him to me.

  No. I wouldn’t let him taint what Chase and I had. I’d die first.

  “I guess this explains how you find them,” I said, keeping my voice low and dull. “Your victims.”

  “I find them the same way you would,” he said. “The same way you will, once you’re mine. Like to like. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone strong enough to help me, someone as special as I am.” He leaned forward and touched my hair. “You’re glorious as a human. So brave. So strong. I should thank Callum for that, I really should. As a Were, you’ll be a princess.” He sighed. “My princess.”

  I shuddered and my throat burned, acid working its way from my stomach to my mouth. I fought the nausea as best I could. In my head, the others roared, and the connection between us pulsed, bright like lightning in my mind.

  They’d escaped from the sheriff with only a bullet graze to Devon’s side that had already started to heal.

  Hold on, hold on, hold on, they told me. We’re coming.

  No, I replied. You don’t understand.

  I begged them to come completely into me, to take my thoughts and knowledge as their own and to know what they were up against.

  Not just a pack of werewolves. A pack of Resilient werewolves—capital R—who’d lose their minds the moment danger closed in. Of my other selves, only Chase had the same advantage. Devon was a purebred and Lake was a fighter, but their instincts to fight, to escape, to win weren’t any stronger than the average werewolf’s.

  “They’re coming,” Wilson said out loud. “Your friends. I can feel them. I can smell them. They smell like anger. Like blood.”

  “So do you.” I met his eyes, and I smiled. “You may be scrappy,” I said, intentionally using the word to demean everything he’d just told me, “but you’re still allergic to silver, aren’t you? You took a couple of bullets. I took a chunk out of your side. You have to be hurting right now.”

  He slammed his arms into me, pushing my chair over backward. My head cracked into the back of the chair, and for a moment, I saw bright lights. Then everything cleared, and I saw him standing over me, his eyes beginning to yellow.

  “I’m going to like Changing you,” he said. “And once I do, we’ll be bonded in a way you can’t even imagine. If you think your connection to Callum’s pack is strong, you’ve seen nothing. Normal pack-bonds don’t hold a candle to what we have. Normal obedience is nothing compared to what you owe your Maker.”

  He’d had a hold on Chase, even after Callum had claimed Chase as part of the Stone River Pack. I was pretty sure I knew exactly how strong that made the bond between a Changed werewolf and the person who brought them over. Chase had broken his, with my help and with Callum’s; if this psycho brought me over, I’d have to do the same.

  Instead of shaking me, Wilson’s words gave me valuable information. They told me that he didn’t know what I’d done to my pack-bond. He didn’t know that I’d re-carved it, connecting myself first and foremost to Chase. He didn’t know that I’d done the same thing with Devon and Lake. This Rabid thought he knew so much about being resilient, but all he knew was how to fight. Maim. Kill. He didn’t know how to see pack-bonds as a threat to his safety, how to attack them, how to escape.

  He didn’t know that I’d done it before and that if he brought me over, I’d do it again.

  He was the one who didn’t know the depths of what he was. What I was. What all of the kids outside were.

  He was the one who didn’t know what he was messing with.

  “Your friends are here,” Wilson told me. As if I didn’t already know. As if I hadn’t felt them coming. As if I couldn’t see out of their eyes—all of their eyes at once. Bleeding and bloody, they were armed to the hilt, and right now, they didn’t care about the fact that the rest of Wilson’s wolves were victims.

  Anyone who stood between them and me was fair game.

  No, I wanted to say, don’t hurt them. But how could I? How could I tie my pack’s hands behind their backs, when the wolves outside were bound to kill them?

  Bound to obey.

  “You see now,” Wilson said, straightening my chair. “You understand. We’re all powerful, but the power? It’s mine.”

  Mine.

  Mine.

  Mine.

  The words echoed in my mind, and in that second I knew exactly what to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I’D THOUGHT IT MYSELF: WILSON DIDN’T KNOW what it really meant to be resilient. He didn’t know how to use it for anything but blood.

  I did.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Chase. I thought of Wilson. I thought of Madison, the grinning six-year-old, and Madison, the ghost of a girl who’d greeted me when I woke up. I thought of what it meant to be a survivor myself, and I cast my mind outward, looking for that in them. The power was twisted in Wilson. Ugly. Dark. And that darkness bled onto the others, tainted them.

  Madison leapt, and Chase met her midair, their teeth snapping at each other’s throats. To their left, Lake took aim and fired atone of the other wolves—small but vicious. My friends and my kind clashed, and their directives pulsed in my head and my veins, until they were all I could hear.

  Protect.

  Protect.

  Obey.

  Obey.

  Save Bryn.

  Kill them all.

  I don’t know where the burst of strength came from, and I didn’t question it. I just shoved my arms outward, straining against the ropes, and they snapped, with the fury of a mother throwing a car off her baby boy. Like a wild thing—a whirl of energy and rage and pulse after pulse of something that I couldn’t name—I jumped out of the chair. But instead of going for Wilson’s throat, instead of killing him, I ran for the door.

  My first order of business wasn’t payback. It was salvation, and right now there was so much at stake.

  “Stop!” I yelled, issuing the word at top volume with both my mouth and my mind. The bond that connected me to Chase, Devon, and Lake crackled, and all three of them paused. Thrown—and affected by the charge of something in the air—their attackers paused, for just a second.

  And then their directive was back.

  Obey.

  “No,” I screamed. “You don’t obey him. You obey me, and I said to stop.”

  I reached for Wilson, for his bond with the others, and I pulled it toward me—pulled their hopes and fears and the people they’d been before
he’d stolen that from them toward me—and it sent them as perfectly still as my friends.

  “What are you doing?” Wilson growled, gripping me from behind. Slowly, the wolves—his wolves—turned from my friends to face him. A growl broke from Madison’s throat, followed directly by a whine.

  She was confused. Who was the alpha here—Wilson or me?

  “You think you can steal them? Make them yours?” Wilson asked, his gaze losing its focus, making him look unhinged.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to make them mine. I want to make them theirs.”

  You have a choice. The words flowed out of me, and into the wolves I was commanding—Devon, Lake, Chase, and all of the others. You can choose to obey, to submit, to let someone else make your decisions, or you can decide. You can decide who you want to be, who you want to be tied to. Who you trust.

  I showed them, with my mind, what I’d done to interfere with their bond to Wilson, and what Chase and I had done, when we’d chosen each other and my friends over Callum’s pack.

  Madison was the first one to melt back into human form. Naked and lying on the ground, she lifted her head, unaware of her own nudity. Broken, but regal.

  “Madison, no,” Wilson said sharply, like a man talking to a dog.

  “Funny thing about resilience,” I said, my heart breaking for her and for all of them. “Being resilient doesn’t just give you the ability to survive. It doesn’t just make you a fighter. It makes you resistant. To injury. To death.” I met Madison’s eyes, looking only at them and not at the rest of her body. “To dominance.”

  Being what we were meant that Chase and I—and all of Wilson’s victims—played by different rules. That was the reason that at the ripe old age of four, I’d been able to shut Callum’s pack out of my head. It was the reason that Chase and I had been able to choose each other over all else.

  It was the reason Chase had been able to break his bond to Wilson for good.

  “If you don’t want to obey him, you don’t have to. You don’t have to obey me, either. But you can connect to me, or to the others, or to anyone you want. You can choose your family. You can choose freedom. You can choose this—”

  I showed them what it was like to be part of a pack like the one my friends and I had created. All of us together, our bodies folding into one, our minds connected.

  Madison pushed herself to her feet and walked toward us—dirty, bleeding, and bare. “I was six. On a vacation with my family, and he took me. He took me and he hurt me and he Changed me.” She looked at Wilson. “You told me that I was yours. You told me how to dress and how to act. You changed my last name. You took away everything, and I. Want. It. Back.”

  She threw her head backward, and I could actually see the power coming off her body, could see tiny bits of light and power that connected the Changed Weres by their souls. And I could see the girl Madison had been, before he’d taken her, rewiring her connections, writing her own destiny.

  One by one by one, the others stood.

  I felt them, reaching out to one another and to me, and in that moment, I made a decision of my own.

  We were the same.

  All of us.

  The same.

  And for whatever reason, I’d been the lucky one. I’d escaped, and they hadn’t. But for the rest of my life, for as long as I lived—whether it was seconds or years—I would be there for them. I would make it up to them. I would help them make it up to themselves.

  Mine.

  Mine.

  Mine.

  The whisper came from all corners of the yard as we claimed one another. From Madison and her pack-mates, from Chase and mine, and then, like the birth of a star, there was an incredible surge of light and heat that threw all of us to the ground.

  Prancer was the only one left standing.

  And as the rest of us got our bearings, only one directive remained in the air and in our bodies.

  Kill the Rabid.

  I stood and walked away from my nightmares until I reached Chase. I pressed myself into his side, and he buried his head in my hair. He was mine, and I was his. We were the same, and we were more.

  I averted my eyes, turning my body into his, and I breathed in his scent, which smelled to me like safety and home. All around us, the others were Shifting into wolf form, and I could feel the power rising in the air. Not just the power of the Shift, not just the power of a pack on the run, but something older.

  Deeper.

  Primal.

  Fight.

  For years, Madison and the others had forgotten that they could. Wilson’s domination had held their instincts at bay, but now …

  Fight.

  Fight.

  Fight.

  An eerie silence descended on the lawn, only to be broken a moment later by a horrible wail, an inhuman sound drowned out by howls and snapping teeth and the sound of flesh tearing like Velcro.

  They leapt at him from all sides. Knocked him to the ground. Mobbed his body, a sea of fur and claw and red-red-red.

  I felt the fury. Felt it like a siren’s call, but I breathed through it, holding tight to Chase, the smell of blood so thick in the air that the other smell—burnt hair and men’s cologne—disappeared into coppery, wet, warm …

  Nothing.

  It was over.

  The feeding frenzy stopped, the haze receding as quick as it had come, and when I lifted my head off Chase’s chest to look at the carnage, there wasn’t enough left of Wilson the Rabid to bury, let alone heal.

  The cries of the pack—our pack—echoed in my head and out of it, as human words and as one united, animalistic howl.

  Chase and I let it roll over us, washing away everything we’d been before this moment. Our bodies intertwined.

  He was mine.

  I was his.

  But we weren’t alone. Not by a long shot. I melted into Chase’s mind, and he came into mine, and as Chase-Wolf-Bryn, for a split second, we saw the world around us with omniscient eyes. Saw our connections to the others—to Lake and Devon and each of the children Wilson had turned. Saw the power we held, saw it well up as the others changed back to human form and turned toward us.

  Pack.

  Pack.

  Pack.

  The exhilaration of being Chase-Wolf-Bryn faded in comparison to the overwhelming sensation of being Us. All of Us. The urge to run, to be free, to be together, was overwhelming, and for the second time in my life, I felt that kind of adrenaline turn toward focusing on a single person. A leader.

  They wanted to run. But they couldn’t. Not yet. All around me, the whisper of the pack took on a single word. Alpha, alpha, alpha.

  And that was when we realized—Chase and his wolf and I—that all of the other wolves seemed to be staring directly at me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ME? HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY BE LOOKING AT ME and thinking a word that conveyed that kind of power? Absolute, unerring, eternal. Protection. Punishment. Justice.

  A pack alpha was many things, but human definitely wasn’t one of them. And yet, there the others were, staring at me with a kind of palpable expectation, their bodies humming with the energy of the kill. They wanted to run, and they wanted me to tell them they could.

  Yours, Chase told me silently, and then, he rested his head on top of mine. His breath was hot on my scalp, and I shivered.

  Mine. That assertion came from the wolf inside Chase—battered and bruised from the fight and angry that he hadn’t been allowed to take down his prey: the man who had dared to touch The Girl. Chase’s wolf wasn’t making a claim over any of the other Resilients, he wasn’t answering their silent plea to run. He was stating what was, to him, quite obvious.

  I was his.

  I wanted to burrow inside of Chase, to hide in his mind, to take refuge in his wolf’s possessiveness and look away from the dozens of eyes—human and wolf—boring into my own, but I couldn’t.

  Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

  The words became a high-pitched
whine in my mind.

  Do what you want, I told them. If you want to run, then run.

  That wasn’t enough for them. It wasn’t what they needed. They needed me. They needed the assurance, the answers. They needed what I’d sworn to give them a moment before—anything and everything to help them overcome years of Wilson’s abuse.

  Run. The word left my mind an instant before it left my mouth, and on both counts, it came from the deepest part of me—from something ancient and pure and utterly confusing. I wasn’t a werewolf, but there was something inside of me. Something as raw and primal as the wolf inside of Chase. A survival instinct—and a protective one—and as I told the others to run, gave them my permission, I shuddered, and then I let their joy overwhelm me as I had that day with Callum’s pack. I let all of them in, felt each and every one of them through our newly formed bond.

  The pack was brutal and beautiful and alive, and overcome with their energy, I threw my head skyward and howled.

  I felt, rather than saw, the effect the sound had on Chase. He arched his back, and the wolf clawed its way to the surface, forcing him to Shift. Instinctively, I dropped down on my knees next to the midnight-black body beside me, and stared into the wolf’s eyes. Chase’s eyes. I buried my hands in his fur—silky, not coarse—and I felt his heart beat under my palms.

  Run. Run. Run, I told the others. This time, my mind-words carried with them joy, as well as power. Lost to the connection and the drive and the urge to move as one, I scrambled to my feet and took off running, an entire pack at my heels, mobbing me. Wanting to be close to me.

  The warmth of their bodies kept my skin from chilling, and the adrenaline passed from one member of the pack to another to another, like a stone skipping on the surface of a pond. Lake, tall and blonde even in wolf form, butted my heels with her head, pushing me to run faster, to let go of myself more.

  And when I did, when the last of my walls crumbled away, that was when I knew.

  The pack was together.

  The pack was safe.