Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Near to them.

  A flash of motion in the corner of my eye sent my body rolling over, and I bounded to my feet. Others! I could feel the pack! I could feel Lily!

  I flattened my ears and bent my legs. Opposite me, my pack-sister bobbed her head.

  Ready.

  Ready.

  Ready.

  Pounce!

  One second, I was inside my little sister’s head, and the next, I was watching Katie and Lily, both in puppy form, rolling around on the carpet. For a moment, I felt a pang of loss—for the excitement, the knowing, the smells—but then I was elsewhere, the pack silent in my head, and my ears ringing with the high-pitched whistle of a biting winter wind.

  Though it was dark, I could see perfectly. The world was awash in purples and black and deep, velvety gray. Like shadows, the trees melded into one another, and one foot after the other, I walked toward them.

  There, in the clearing, was a female wolf—the female wolf—her head held high, her coat snow-kissed and damp. I wanted to go to her, but by the time I got to the place where she’d stood a moment before, she was gone, and I was alone.

  “Too bad,” a light but resonating voice said. “So sad. Guess it’s just you and me.”

  I whirled to see the man from my earlier dream leaning back against a tree, his eyes locked onto my body, his face twisted with an expression halfway between intrigue and revulsion.

  “Hello, mutt-lover.” His tone was deceptively pleasant—rat poison dipped in chocolate. My temples pounded, and I could feel him inside my head, feel him turning me inside out, touching me—

  I took a step backward, but there was nowhere to go.

  Nowhere to run.

  I thought of the pack, tried to conjure up an image of them, a memory, the pack-bond—anything that might free my limbs enough that I could move, fight back, at least respond.

  “Isn’t that sweet? You think there’s a way out.” The man’s voice wove its way around my limbs, like a snake climbing up one leg, around my torso, and down the opposite arm. “You’re awfully young, aren’t you, wolf girl?”

  A flash of unadulterated loathing passed across his face, but I couldn’t tell if it was aimed at himself or at me. “Poor little girl, lost in her own mind. Poor little girl, lost in the woods.”

  He took one step toward me, then another, his dilated pupils turning indigo eyes nearly entirely black.

  Sweat rose on the surface of my skin.

  A circle of flame burst to life at my feet.

  I wheezed. I bit back a scream, and just before my body caught on fire, the roar of the pack broke through to my mind, and I felt a phantom hand latch on to my shoulder and pull.

  With a gasp, I woke up. My entire body jerked in my seat, and my history teacher stopped her lecture just long enough to ask, very pointedly, if I was okay. I nodded, but with the smell of smoke thick in my nostrils and sweat running down the back of my neck, even that tiny gesture was a lie.

  Hello, mutt-lover.

  I couldn’t shake the memory of the voice, and even as the rest of the pack flooded my senses with reassurances, gentle nudges and nips at the edge of my mind, I shuddered.

  The bell rang, and after a moment, I gathered my notebook and stood, my limbs stiff, the movement painful and awkward.

  And that was when I realized that my skin was angry, pink, and warm to the touch. To all appearances, I was sunburned.

  In the middle of winter. Inside my high school.

  I brought my right hand to my left and pressed my index finger down on my left wrist. I winced slightly at the subtle burn and then let go. My fingerprint appeared as a white mark on my reddish skin, but after a few seconds, the mark faded.

  My memory of the dream—and the expression on the face of the man who’d attacked me—did not. I could feel his stare, see the fire leaping to life at my feet, and even though he hadn’t actually said it, looking back, I could hear a promise passing from his lips to my ears.

  You’re going to burn.

  I barely made it to lunch, and I knew before Devon said a word that the others had picked up on at least some portion of what had happened to me—not the details, but enough to know that I was on edge, that the part of me that was Pack was calling for blood.

  An animal backed into a corner either cowers or snaps. Most werewolves weren’t any different, and human or not, I wasn’t the type to cower.

  “Dare I guess we’re eating outside today?” Devon asked, the set of his jaw belying the casual tone with which he’d issued the question. His hair might have been gelled; his shirt might have been fitted, but beneath the surface of his skin, the wolf was restless.

  He’d sensed the threat—they all had.

  “We’re eating outside,” I confirmed, taking a step away from Devon and trying not to listen to the quiet rumble of the wolf beneath his skin. I had enough going on in my own mind right now; I didn’t need to deal with Devon’s animal desire to protect me at all costs.

  I also didn’t need to deal with below-freezing temperatures and a wind chill disturbingly close to zero, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and the conversation I was about to have with Devon, Maddy, and Lake wasn’t the kind you could have in the middle of the high school cafeteria.

  Despite the intense chill, sitting on the ledge outside the cafeteria loosened the knot in my chest and stomach. I could smell the wind, the trees, cedar and cinnamon, pine needles and morning dew.

  “Chase.” Devon said his name before I could process the scents or let the warmth of his presence wash over me, and I followed my friend’s gaze out past the parking lot, to the line of trees that marked the spot where forest gave way to the town.

  There, standing guard, was a wolf as dark as midnight, smaller than some, but bigger than any natural wolf.

  Chase, I called out to him. Someone might see you.

  In wolf form, Chase didn’t speak back to me in words. Instead, I got pictures—mostly of me—and the distinct sense that if the wolf had had its way, he and Chase would never have let me out of their sight in the first place. I was what mattered to them, and my urge to find this threat and tear it to pieces was nothing compared to how much Chase and his wolf wanted to see me, smell me, protect me.

  Fine, Chase, I said silently, giving in because if he had been the one under attack, I probably would have done something a lot rasher than standing guard at the edge of the woods. Just stay hidden.

  This time, I caught a hint of Chase’s human side in his reply, something that told me that he was good at blending in to the background, that he’d spent most of his human life trying not to be noticed.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty.” Lake tried for nonchalance in her tone but couldn’t quite sell it, and her voice quivered as she pressed on. “Want to tell us what’s going on, and why exactly you look like you’ve seen the wrong side of a barbeque?” She plopped down next to me and stretched out her legs.

  You guys remember that thing we weren’t going to tell Devon? I asked Lake and Maddy silently. They both shifted slightly in response. Devon narrowed his eyes, and Lake batted her eyelashes in a show of innocence that was just this side of terrifying.

  I think we’re going to have to tell him, I continued. Any volunteers?

  “Not it,” Lake said out loud.

  “Not it,” Maddy chimed in quickly.

  I sighed. “Hey, Dev, funny story …”

  Shockingly, Devon didn’t find the story of the previous night’s events very funny, and none of them—not Lake, not Devon, not Maddy, not Chase in wolf form, lurking in the distance—was overly amused by the morning’s development.

  “You had a dream that someone was trying to set you on fire, and when you woke up, your skin was burned,” Lake repeated humorlessly.

  I leaned back on my wrists and blew out a breath, watching it take shape in the winter air. “That about covers it.”

  “Except, of course, for the part where my brother sent you veiled threats about someone else coming after
Lucas, and the part where our gentleman visitor looked you straight in the eye and told you the threat was human.”

  When Devon got irked, he had a tendency to over-enunciate, and by the end of that sentence, his pronunciation was sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Lucas wasn’t lying.” Maddy was the only one willing to speak up and voluntarily step into Devon’s line of fire. “I was there. Lake was there. We would have smelled it.”

  “There’s lying and there’s not-lying,” Lake replied, mulling over each word. “If you ask me, Lucas was not-lying. His words weren’t exactly false, but for someone who wants our help, the boy isn’t really what you would call forthcoming.”

  Lucas hadn’t ever explicitly said that the people after him weren’t a threat. He’d never said that they weren’t dangerous. He’d said that they were human, and I’d filled in the blanks on my own. The irony of the situation—that I of all people had assumed that by virtue of being human, a person couldn’t possibly be a threat—did not escape me.

  Devon leaned over and pressed two fingers deliberately against my cheek, watching the skin go pale and then pink again. After a moment, he repeated the action.

  “Are you done yet?” I asked, shoving him, to absolutely no avail.

  “Depends. Is my bestie done lying to me and pretending things are okay when they aren’t? Hmmmmm?”

  Devon poked me again. I was on the verge of giving in and promising him that whatever happened next, I would tell him, whether I thought hearing it would be good for him or not, but before I could say the words, our conversation was interrupted.

  At first, the interrupter didn’t say anything. She just walked up to us—right up to us—so close that the tips of her black leather boots almost touched my jean-clad legs. She didn’t kneel to our level to speak. She didn’t even look down. Instead, she stared off into the distance.

  Into the forest.

  At Chase.

  “Hello there,” Devon said, shifting position to move a fraction of an inch closer to the intruder. “Is there something I can help you with? Directions to the gymnasium? Personal tutoring on Hamlet? Predictions on this year’s Oscar favorites?”

  Personally, I thought he was laying the drama geek vibe on a little thick, but the girl—the same one I’d seen in the cafeteria the week before—didn’t so much as bat an eye. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say that she paid less attention to Dev than any female had in a very long time.

  When she did shift her gaze from the forest, the girl had eyes only for me.

  “I’m Caroline,” she said, “and you’re the wolf girl.”

  I’d certainly been called worse, but my breath caught in my throat the moment she said the word wolf.

  I stood up and looked down at her. Humans didn’t know about the existence of werewolves, and they especially didn’t know about the existence of my pack here, in my territory, at my high school.

  “Who are you?” I took a step forward. If we’d been anywhere near the same height, my face would have been right in hers, but she was so small that the top of her head didn’t even reach my chin.

  “I’m Caroline,” she repeated. “Keep up.”

  Caroline. Looked like a porcelain doll, felt like a threat.

  My brain absorbed the information and fed it automatically to the rest of the pack, a transfer as simple and reflexive as taking a breath and then breathing out.

  “I believe you have something that belongs to us.”

  Us?

  I glanced over Caroline’s shoulder, half expecting to see an army of pint-sized leather-clad divas, but as best I could tell, she was alone.

  “Define something,” I said, pushing down the urge to place a hand on each of her shoulders and force her, belly up, to the ground.

  Not here, I told myself. Not now.

  “I believe its name is Lucas.” Caroline scuffed the heel of her boot into the ground, and it took me a minute to realize that she was etching a symbol into the snow. “On the off chance that you’ve had multiple Lucases show up at the home front in the past couple of days, ours should have been fairly clearly marked.”

  For a split second, it was like I was staring right at the back of Lucas’s neck again, and the scar I’d seen there, ugly and puckered, was an exact reflection of the shape in the snow: a four-pointed star laid over a half circle.

  “You recognize it,” Caroline said. “Very good. You get a sticker. Sadly, you won’t be able to really enjoy that sticker if we’re forced to put you down like a rabid dog.”

  The second the threat left her mouth, Devon, Lake, and Maddy were on their feet, and I could feel the hackles rising on Chase’s back in the distance.

  For the first time, Caroline flicked her eyes around the rest of our little group, and she held one gloved hand out to Devon. “Down, boy,” she said, not even bothering to reply to Maddy or Lake. “That wasn’t a threat. It was a conditional statement. If we get back what’s ours, everyone lives to howl at the moon another day. If we don’t …”

  Caroline shrugged delicately. A low growl ripped its way out of Maddy’s throat. I glanced at her, and she swallowed the inhuman noise, but not without taking a step closer to the little blonde girl with the great big mouth.

  “Who’s we?” My voice gave no hint of the deafening barrage of thoughts in my mind. I was cool, calm, collected.

  So was she.

  “My family.” Caroline dragged her eyes up and down my body, and they settled on my sunburned cheeks. “I see you’ve already met Archer. He has an uncanny way of getting under your skin, wouldn’t you say?”

  She gave me time to reply, then smiled when I didn’t say a word. “You’ll have to excuse his manners, though. Archer’s all about the hunt.”

  Hello, mutt-lover. The voice echoed through my memory, and my temples throbbed just thinking about it.

  “My mother told him to wait, but Archer was anxious to meet you in person. If she tells him to pull back, though, he’ll listen. My mother can be a very persuasive woman, and she has no desire for bloodshed, especially not yours, Bryn.”

  They knew my name.

  “I think you’ll find us reasonable. We won’t attack. We won’t rush you. My family can be very patient—some of us, anyway.” Caroline folded her hands in front of her and brought blue eyes to meet mine once more. “You have one week.”

  “One week,” Lake repeated. “One week or what?”

  Lake, I said sharply. On instinct, I held her back, my mind willing her feet not to move, not to carry her into a confrontation with an enemy whose true nature was still, for the most part, unknown.

  “One week or what?” Devon repeated. He didn’t make a move on Caroline, and it was taking everything I had to keep Lake from ripping out her throat, so I let him press the question in his own way: with a gentle elevation of one eyebrow and an endless, pointed stare.

  Caroline took a step back, but I knew by the expression on her face that it wasn’t a retreat. She ran the tip of one gloved finger over the inside edge of her jacket, and I saw a flash of silver.

  She didn’t draw her weapon, but I knew the others had seen it, too.

  “I never miss.” Caroline said the words simply, the same way I would have said that my eyes were brown.

  “Guess that makes two of us.” Lake hooked her fingertips through the belt loops on her jeans, a casual gesture completely at odds with the tension in her neck.

  “No,” Caroline said softly. “You do miss. If the target’s too far away, or if the wind isn’t right. If you throw knives or take a shot with an arrow, if you line someone up in your sight—sometimes, you miss.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And you don’t?”

  Caroline inclined her chin slightly. “No.” A faint breeze caught her hair, and it fanned out like a halo around her head. Beside me, Devon stiffened and took a step forward.

  “Can’t smell me, can you?” Caroline said, a soft, deadly smile working its way onto her lips. “Call it a gift. Once I leave he
re, you won’t be able to track me. If I’m a hundred yards out, you won’t hear me coming.”

  Her tone was enough to send a chill up my spine, but that was nothing compared to what I was feeling from the others. She was standing right in front of them, and they couldn’t smell her. She was armed, and unless they wanted the whole school to see it, they couldn’t attack.

  “What are you?” I couldn’t help asking the question. She looked human, but there wasn’t a human on the planet who could sneak up on a Were. There wasn’t a hint of fear on her face.

  There was no doubt.

  She knew what we were, and she wasn’t afraid—and that was terrifying.

  “I’m a hunter.” Caroline’s smile grew predatory. “It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.”

  Threat.

  The sensation was so overwhelming, so intense that I could feel it as bile in the back of my throat, an incredible pressure at my temples, a knife through my stomach. I let go of my mental hold on Lake, because I needed every ounce of control I had to keep myself from springing forward and tackling this thing in front of me to the ground.

  She shouldn’t have been able to make me feel this way. I shouldn’t have taken her words at face value, but it was all too easy to believe that when she took aim, she really didn’t miss—that she couldn’t, that the rest of her so-called family was just as unnatural, just as deadly.

  Threat. Threat. Threat.

  Predatory grin still in place, Caroline took another step backward, her hands held out to the sides, like she was dancing.

  Like she was seconds away from going for her knife.

  “You have one week,” she said, and then, with every confidence that not one of us would go for her back, she turned and walked toward the school.

  You can’t smell me, she’d promised. You won’t hear me coming.

  It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.

  I never miss.

  “Show of hands,” Devon said, breaking the silence. “Who thinks we’re screwed?”

  CHAPTER NINE