Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Mitch was Pack, but even living at the center of our territory, he seemed more like a peripheral, less connected to me and the others than we were to one another. It was a testament to Mitch’s experience and age—a few hundred years, at least—that he was able to keep his mental distance and still make his words heard in my mind at will.

  “Lucas,” I repeated out loud. I stepped into the room and was greeted with a face so blank that I had to wonder if he’d heard me say his name or registered my presence here at all.

  The boy in question was olive-skinned, but pallor had settled over his cheeks, and he didn’t twitch or move at all as I approached. The stillness was unnatural on a Were, and watching him felt as odd as seeing a lion lying faint on the floor. He looked like someone had drained the blood from his body and then leeched his will to live straight from his soul.

  I crossed the room to stand at the foot of his bed, keeping myself just out of his reach. “I’m Bryn,” I said, for lack of a better opening, “and you’re on Cedar Ridge land.”

  “I know.” His voice wasn’t quiet or raspy or anything else I’d expected of it. Instead, it had an almost musical quality to it, like he would have been more at home singing along to an acoustic guitar than forcing his mouth to speak regularly. “I came here for you.”

  Devon was beside me in an instant. To his credit, he didn’t stand straight, and his lip didn’t curl back to reveal canines, but his size and presence spoke for themselves. “Did your alpha send you?” Devon asked, refusing to refer to Shay by name.

  The boy on the bed shuddered and then his body fell almost immediately back into stillness, like even shivering was too much for his fractured mind to bear.

  “When you say you came here for Bryn,” Lake added, her eyes glittering and utterly lethal, “what exactly would you be meaning by that?”

  So much for my doing the talking.

  “I can’t … I can’t live like that. Not anymore. It’s—” The boy blinked and even that seemed to take gargantuan effort. “I just can’t do it.” Ignoring Lake and Devon, Lucas looked at me—not at my eyes, but close enough that I felt the weight of each word out of his mouth. “They say you help people. That you save them. Callum’s Bryn. That’s you, right?”

  “You didn’t come here to kill Bryn.” Devon’s voice matched the tone in Lucas’s almost exactly, and I wondered if Dev even realized he was doing it. “And your alpha didn’t send you?”

  Lucas moved, and I braced myself. At first, I thought he was leaping to his feet, but when he stopped moving, he was still on the bed, kneeling and no longer covered by the threadbare sheet.

  Angry white scars crisscrossed his torso and arms like tiny Xs and Os. He’d been cut, long and deep, over and over again. “You want to know if Shay sent me?” he asked Devon. “If your brother sent me?” Lucas breathed in raggedly and lowered his voice. “You look just like him.”

  Devon didn’t even blink, but inside, I winced for him, knowing that Lucas’s words would undoubtedly have left a mark.

  “I suppose whether or not Shay sent me depends on your definition of the word sent. He beat me. He hounded me. And when it got to the point that I couldn’t think of fighting back, couldn’t even muster up the strength to keep wishing he was dead, when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse for me in Snake Bend”—Lucas settled back, his eyes blank, his voice soft—“they did.”

  “Why?” The word burst out of Lake’s mouth a second before I could give voice to the question myself. “Why would your own alpha do something like that?”

  Now Lucas didn’t look at Lake, or at me. He looked at Devon, and I wondered if he was really seeing Dev or if he was still caught up in memory, seeing Shay in the features the brothers shared.

  “Why?” Lucas repeated. “My alpha is the type who needs a punching bag when things are going badly.” He shifted his gaze from Devon to me. “And lately, things haven’t exactly been going well.”

  Lucas’s words hit me hard, the image of his bloodied body interwoven in my mind with that of the scars that still marred his flesh. Shay had done that to Lucas. He’d done it because he was a bully and because he couldn’t touch the person he most wanted to hurt, the reason things had not been going according to his master plan.

  Me.

  Six months earlier, Shay had gone to Alpine Creek, Wyoming, expecting to return with fresh blood and females for the Snake Bend Pack, and because of me, he’d gone home empty-handed and watched as a human girl walked away with everything he’d wanted for himself.

  I’d seen the bloodlust in Shay’s eyes. I knew how badly he’d wanted to slam me into a wall, to rip out my insides and watch my body crumble to the ground. But thanks to the power Callum held over the rest of the werewolf Senate, thanks to the Senate’s own laws, Shay couldn’t touch me.

  In the wild, when an animal is forced to pull back from attacking an adversary and turned its wrath on an easier target instead, they called it redirected aggression.

  There was a chance—a good one—that what Shay had done to Lucas he’d done because of me.

  “What do you want from us?” I asked Lucas, unable to keep myself from taking a step closer to the dead eyes that looked up at me from the bed. “Why did you come here?”

  I didn’t bother telling myself that the only one to blame for Shay’s actions was Shay. It didn’t even matter if I believed it. I wasn’t the kind of person who could look at someone like Lucas and walk away with something as pat as an “it’s not my fault.”

  In response to my question, Lucas tilted his head to the side, a gesture more animal than not. “I want you to claim me,” he said, like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t want to be Snake Bend anymore. I want to be Cedar Ridge.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “HE WANTS TO TRANSFER PACKS?”

  No matter how many times I said those words, I still couldn’t quite believe that was why Lucas had come all the way to the Wayfarer, a place that must have felt like enemy territory to his wolf, the same way he felt foreign to me. Bleeding and bloody, beaten within an inch of his life and unable to Shift, he’d limped and stumbled his way over mountains and through the forest and around God knew how many towns where he might have been spotted and shot—and he’d done all of that in the single-minded pursuit of one thing.

  Me.

  They say you help people. Callum’s Bryn.

  I struggled to keep my head up under the memory of Lucas’s words and the hope I’d seen in his otherwise dead eyes. I didn’t want to be anyone’s last hope any more than I wanted to be some kind of werewolf legend: the Little Human That Could.

  “What this kid is asking,” Chase said slowly, mulling over the words, “is it even possible?”

  After meeting with Lucas, I’d retreated to the forest to process his request. Chase had been waiting for me when I got there, and everything that had happened passed between us with a single touch. Devon and Lake had followed on my heels, and now, there we were, the four of us. I breathed in deeply through my nose, banishing Lucas’s scent with theirs and reminding myself that, alpha or not, I wasn’t in this alone.

  “People do transfer packs,” Devon said slowly. “It’s a coming-of-age thing.”

  I snorted. “Coming-of-age? Please, Dev. This isn’t Catcher in the Rye. Pack transfers happen when a wolf gets exiled from one pack and picked up by another, or after someone’s been peripheral for years. That’s how it happened when Mitch left Callum’s pack. That’s how it happened a hundred years ago when Shay transferred to Snake Bend. That’s how it works. It’s nature’s way of shaking up the gene pool—and it doesn’t happen like this.”

  I wasn’t telling Devon anything he didn’t know, but in a show of grace, he didn’t call me on it. I took that as a sign that he knew how uncomfortable I was with Lucas’s coming here, looking at me like I was different from the others, like I could be his savior. Being alpha was one thing with my own pack—we were young, and we were family, and I wo
uld have died for any of them, no questions asked. I needed to protect them, more than I needed water or air or any kind of human connection.

  But this?

  Lucas wasn’t a member of our pack. I didn’t know him, didn’t love him, couldn’t see inside his mind or feel his emotions as my own. I knew from experience—first with Callum’s pack and later with the Rabid—that I had the ability to rewire pack-bonds, breaking another alpha’s hold over a wolf and psychically instating my own, but I also knew that doing so wasn’t something the powers that be in our world would let me get away with a second time. Mitch had said it himself—not all alphas were as forgiving as Callum had been when I’d claimed Devon, Lake, and Chase.

  The same law that kept the other alphas from coming here and raiding our ranks for child brides forbade me from interfering with Lucas’s ties to Shay’s pack. I couldn’t just welcome him with open arms and say, “Hey, sorry your alpha has been torturing you on my account. Make yourself at home.”

  “Shay has to agree,” I said slowly, realizing even as I did that I might as well be saying something about hell freezing over or pigs taking flight. “For Lucas to transfer from Snake Bend to Cedar Ridge, Shay would have to agree.”

  Anything less could start a war—or worse, give the other alphas, Shay included, the justification they needed to take what was mine.

  I wanted to help Lucas. I did. The idea of sending him back to Shay, knowing what Shay would do to him for running away, made me want to vomit.

  But I couldn’t risk my pack’s safety for his.

  —Maddy—

  The part of me that was alpha felt her approaching, and I wondered how long she’d debated before joining the four of us in the woods. She was the newest recruit to our inner circle, and even though we were Pack, even though that made us family, I knew she was still getting used to trusting other people, to believing that they could care about her the way we did.

  Being raised by a psychopath will do that to you.

  “Hey, Mads.” Devon greeted her with a smile, and I knew he felt the same tug I did: to protect Maddy, to make her feel safe, to make sure she knew that on four legs or two, she belonged. Only this time, those mandates were in conflict with each other. Protecting Maddy meant telling her that everything was fine, that we would take care of this, that she didn’t need to worry about Snake Bend or Shay or the battered boy in Cabin 13. But doing that would put up a wall between her and the rest of us. It would be saying that Maddy was weak or broken, that because she’d been a victim, she’d never get to be anything else.

  I couldn’t do that any more than I could have stripped Lake of her weapons or demanded that Chase open up at the next run and tell the entire pack his human life story.

  “The boy is part of the Snake Bend Pack. His alpha has been abusing him, and he came here hoping we could help.” Hoping I could help, I corrected myself silently. “He wants to transfer packs, but Senate law says I need his alpha’s permission first.”

  Maddy absorbed this information in an instant, and something dark and animal settled over her gray eyes. When she spoke, her voice was absolutely calm, but there was something almost regal about it.

  Something deadly.

  “His alpha won’t give permission,” she said softly. “He’ll be furious that the boy got away, that he came here. He won’t like being outsmarted. Monsters like that don’t like knowing there’s a part of people that you can’t touch unless they let you.” Maddy shrugged, like her words weren’t important, like she wasn’t talking about herself every bit as much as she was talking about Lucas. “If you send this boy back, his alpha will kill him.”

  I wanted to tell Maddy that she was wrong, that Shay wouldn’t kill Lucas, that Pack Law wouldn’t allow it.

  Unfortunately, it did, and Shay would, and I knew, just looking at Maddy, that she wouldn’t understand how I could ever let that happen.

  I couldn’t.

  If things had gone differently, I might have grown up in Maddy’s place, attacked and raised by a killer who stripped away everything that made me a person, everything that made me me. The others knew me better and had known me longer, but Maddy and I were the most alike, the two of us separated only by winds of chance that had blown her one way and me the other.

  I couldn’t let Shay kill Lucas.

  If I didn’t do something to save this battered foreign boy, Maddy would never forgive me, and I would never, ever forgive myself.

  Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

  The thrum of the bond at the gateway of my mind was a constant, incessant reminder that being alpha meant making tough decisions. It meant protecting my pack to the detriment of anything and everything else. I knew that. I accepted it, but I was human, too, and I hadn’t grown up under Callum’s tutelage for nothing.

  There was always a way around orders, a way to be the exception instead of the rule. I just needed to find it. I was going to find it.

  Even if it killed me.

  Chase arched one eyebrow at me, and Devon narrowed his eyes slightly. “Let the record show that I don’t trust the expression on your face right now. I know that expression, Bronwyn.”

  Lake smiled beatifically, ready and willing to misbehave. “So do I.”

  When it came to the ins and outs of werewolf politics, my resources were severely limited. Of the members of our pack, fourteen had been the taught the ways of the world by a Rabid, two were infants, two had spent their lives as peripherals, one had been a werewolf for less than a year, and the remaining three were Devon, Ali, and me.

  Long story short: it wasn’t like I had a werewolf Yoda to show me the ropes. My best bet in our pack was probably Mitch, and if he had information he wanted to share, he would have already given it to me. Ali probably knew more about werewolves than any human on the planet, but somehow, I didn’t think approaching my legal guardian and saying, “Hey, I need to find a loophole so I can steal another alpha’s werewolf and give him even more reason to want me dead,” would go over terribly well.

  That left me with exactly two options: Google and Callum. Since I didn’t think a random internet search was going to reveal even a fraction of what I needed to know, I went back to the cabin I shared with Ali and the twins, and sequestered myself in my bedroom to make a call.

  Convincing myself to dial the number was harder than it should have been. The part of me that was alpha objected to the idea of bringing another pack into this, and the part of me that had once considered Callum like family balked at the idea of hearing his voice.

  There were things—more of them than I wanted to admit—that were easier to forget when Callum stayed in his territory and I stayed in mine.

  Flopping down on my bed, I reached for my nightstand and picked up the carving he’d sent me. I still had no idea what it was supposed to mean, but I was positive that it did mean something, and that if and when I called Callum, nothing I had to say would surprise him in the least.

  I’d spent my entire life growing up under Callum’s watch without realizing that he had a psychic knack. Sometimes it felt like everyone but me had known that Callum saw flashes of the future and made a routine practice of nudging it in one direction or another. He was fallible. He wasn’t omniscient—but he’d probably known that I was going to call him before the option had even occurred to me, and if I chickened out, he’d probably know that, too.

  Screw that.

  My fingers were dialing before my mind had processed the decision to do so, and my breath caught in my throat with the first ring. I pictured Callum’s house and saw the landline ringing over and over again.

  Maybe I should have called his cell.

  The moment that thought crossed my mind, someone picked up the phone, and a smooth, even voice said hello.

  Not Callum’s.

  The voice was female, and even if I hadn’t recognized it, the process of elimination would have told me that it was Sora—the only female Were in Callum’s pack now that Katie and Lake were in mine. Unfortunately
, Sora was also Devon’s mother, which meant that she was Shay’s mother. I was going to go out on a limb and guess she probably wasn’t the best person to ask about how to legally steal a wolf out from under the monstrous product of her loins.

  Ew. I so did not want to be thinking about Devon’s mother’s loins.

  “Hello?” Sora repeated for what was probably the third or fourth time.

  “It’s me.” I’d spent as much time at Devon’s house as my own growing up, so I took it for granted that Sora would know who the me in question was.

  “Bryn.” There was a faint trace of a smile in Sora’s voice, and I pulled my knees tight to my chest, surprised at how short a mental hop it was from hearing her say my name to thinking about the last time I’d seen her.

  I could almost hear my ribs popping, feel my mouth bleeding as she came at me again and again.

  I tried to force myself out of the memory. When I’d broken faith with Callum’s pack and he’d ordered me beaten, Sora was the one who had carried out the sentence. I knew now that the entire ordeal had been part of a larger plan, one that had led me to the founding of the Cedar Ridge Pack, but that didn’t make me hate Sora for it any less.

  “Did you want something, Bryn?” Sora’s voice was unbothered and calm, and I wondered if she’d thought, even for a second, about asking me about Devon.

  “I need to talk to Callum,” I replied tersely. “Is he around?”

  “He’s otherwise occupied at the moment.”

  I recognized the half-truth for what it was. For all I knew, Callum was “otherwise occupied” with watching Sora talk to me.

  “You might as well just say he doesn’t want to talk to me,” I said dryly. “It’s not going to hurt my tender feelings. This is business.”

  Sora snorted. “Some of us have manners.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and some of us are alphas, so if the Stone River big guy can’t spare the time to talk to the head of Cedar Ridge, just say so.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was deafening. I counted to ten in my head and wondered if Sora was doing the same.