Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  It melted under Archer’s feet.

  So much for a cease-fire.

  “Hey now,” he said, looming over me and sounding almost offended. “I’m not doing anything unsavory here. This is a dream of your making, not mine, wolf girl. I’m just along for the ride.”

  Pain chipped away at my temple, like a metal pick striking ice. I fought my way through it, getting to my feet, fists clenched and thirsting for this psychic’s blood, but suddenly and without warning, I couldn’t breathe.

  I looked down and realized with mounting horror that the gashes in my side were still growing—bigger and bigger—and they weren’t even bleeding anymore. I could see through them, all the way through my body and out the other side.

  Beneath my skin, where there should have been fat and bone and muscle, there was nothing.

  No organs. No blood.

  I was hollow.

  I woke with a start, and in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, my other senses flared to life. The room didn’t smell right. It didn’t feel right, and the scratching sound of inhuman nails against wooden floor told me that I wasn’t alone.

  A silver knife was in my hand before I realized I had reached for it. I put my back to the wall and like a wild thing, I crouched slightly, holding my blade at the ready, right next to my ear.

  The wolf at the foot of my bed backed up slowly. It took me a moment to recognize him, and a moment past that to push down the compulsion to throw the knife at the spot directly between his light brown eyes.

  “Lucas?” I said, trying to process that he was there on my bedroom floor. He made no move to attack, and I returned the favor, but my fingers tightened around the hilt of the blade, ready to buy me whatever time they could.

  In human form, Lucas was unassuming. Small. As a wolf, he was scraggly, with ribs poking out under matted fur and eyes that I could describe only as hungry.

  “Change.” My voice shook slightly as I said the word, and I narrowed my eyes, allowing my own pack’s power to flow through me, banishing the kind of fear that the wolf in front of me might be able to smell. “Change, or I’ll call for the others, and we’ll hand you to the coven wrapped up in a little bow.”

  At the word coven, the wolf went very still, and then I heard the first crack of bone. The shudder that went through Lucas’s body in the instant before the Change whetted my own appetite—for running, for hunting, for something—but I kept myself from moving, from approaching him.

  I didn’t lower the knife.

  By the time Lucas finished Changing, my own brow was covered with sweat, and my senses were heightened. My heart made itself known with uncompromising force beneath my rib cage, and my ears caught the muted sound of Lucas’s ragged breaths. He was hunched over on the floor, but he lifted his eyes to stare just over my left shoulder. The moonlight caught his irises.

  He was naked.

  Modesty warred with my survival instincts and lost. I knew better than to take my eyes off a predator, naked or not.

  “I would never hurt you,” Lucas said, his voice breaking. “I needed … to run … I needed … to Shift.…” He shivered, eyeing the knife in my hands. “I needed …”

  Me.

  My mind finished the sentence for him, and I prayed he wouldn’t say it out loud.

  “I needed to know,” Lucas said.

  I breathed an internal sigh of relief that the naked boy on my floor hadn’t confessed his undying need for me.

  “Yeah, well, I need you to cover yourself up.” I lowered the knife and reached across my body with my left hand to grab the blanket off my bed. I tossed it toward Lucas, and he caught it and did as I asked.

  “I also need for you not to show up in my bedroom in the middle of the night.” I tried to put this in terms he could understand. “This is my territory. My personal territory, and no one comes here without an invitation.”

  “I need to know.” Lucas was hunched over so far that his broken request was issued more to my feet than my face. “Are you going to hand me over?”

  “I don’t know.” Now my voice was the one breaking. “I’m sorry, Lucas, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping there’s a way, I’m going to try to find a way, but if you’re asking if I’ll send my pack to war to keep you safe, when Shay could come in at any moment and demand you back, the answer is no. I can’t promise that, and you shouldn’t be asking me to.”

  “There’s a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing,” a low, even voice said.

  Chase.

  I felt him before I saw him, and my body didn’t register even a hint of surprise at his presence. Of course he’d come. Of course he was moving to stand between Lucas and me.

  “Lucas shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be asking you to do this. And he shouldn’t take it the wrong way that I’m going to give him until I count to three to put as much distance between the two of you as he possibly can.”

  “Chase—”

  Chase didn’t let me finish. “He should also be glad that I beat the others here, because I doubt Devon or Lake would be nearly as understanding about this as I am.”

  Even in the scant moonlight, I could make out the way Chase’s pupils surged until his eyes were more black than blue. There was a part of him—a bigger part than I’d realized—that knew violence, the way he and I knew each other.

  He was fighting it, and he was trying, but I could sense his human half wanting to hurl Lucas across the room every bit as much as his wolf wanted to sink fang into flesh.

  “One.”

  As the alpha, I could have made him stop, but I didn’t.

  “Two.”

  Lucas took off through the window, the same way he must have come in, and Chase followed him far enough to shut the pane carefully behind him, lock it. He let out a long, even breath.

  “He didn’t hurt you.”

  I got the feeling that Chase was talking to himself more than asking me a question.

  “He didn’t hurt me,” I echoed. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to point out that I could take care of myself. Instead, I pried my fingers off the knife still clutched in my right hand and massaged my knuckles.

  Chase’s eyes faded back to their natural blue, and he crossed the room. He ran one hand over my arm and nodded, as if to convince himself that I was fine, that Lucas hadn’t hurt me—even though he could have.

  “Bryn?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Chase nodded, breathed in my scent.

  “He’s broken,” I said. “The look on his face, it was just …”

  “I know,” Chase said. “Trust me, Bryn. I—of all people—know.”

  “But,” I prompted, sensing he had more to say.

  “I know what he’s been through and I’m sorry for it, but I don’t trust him.”

  I didn’t trust Lucas, either—not by a long shot. He was too unpredictable; he held things back from us too often, too much. But even though I didn’t trust Lucas, I knew what it was like to be broken, to have to fight through it and find a way to put yourself and your life back together.

  And so did Chase.

  That was why I needed to do something—because once upon a time, another alpha had done something for me.

  “You wanted me to go and talk to Lucas, to form my own impressions, and I did,” Chase said, pulling my mind back to the present. “Lucas is desperate. Desperate people do desperate things, Bryn.”

  I heard him. I believed him—but I couldn’t wash my hands of this, no matter how much Chase wanted me to. I couldn’t let Lucas down just to take care of myself.

  Chase pressed his lips to my temple, and I felt their touch through my whole body.

  Your job is watching out for the pack, he’d told me. Let my job be watching out for you.

  His lips traveled from my temple down to my mouth, his arms pulling me closer—and for a few moments, when it was just the two of us and I could feel him everywhere, it didn’t matter that I was alpha, didn’t matter tha
t he wanted things for me that I would never be able to have.

  I didn’t think about Lucas or the coven or the million and one ways this situation could end badly for everyone involved.

  All I thought about was us. Chase and Bryn. Bryn and Chase.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHASE SPENT THE NIGHT, AND I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning with my head on his chest and his body curved around mine, like he could ward off the outside world by wrapping my frame in his. I listened to his heart beating in his chest, and burrowed in closer, surrounding myself with the warmth of his body, the scent of his skin.

  This was right. This was safe. This had kept the nightmares away.

  And then I heard the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. My first thought was that Lucas was back. My second was that the coven, unable to send Archer into my dreams, had come to try out their intimidation factor in person. My third thought was the most logical—and the most terrifying.

  Ali.

  I flipped over onto my side and looked at the digital clock on my nightstand. 10:23.

  “Chase.” I kept the volume of my voice low but made up for it by shoving him in the ribs.

  “Bryn,” he said, his eyes still closed, a loopy smile on his face.

  “Get up.”

  He must have sensed the urgency in my tone, because the next second, the smile was gone and there was something feral and hard in its place. He moved quickly, pushing me back toward the headboard, crouching in front of me.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Not that kind of danger, Chase, I told him silently. You’re a boy. In my bed. And Ali doesn’t believe in sleeping past ten thirty. Ever. It’s a miracle she didn’t drag me out of bed to get ready for school.

  In the madness of the day before, I hadn’t gotten around to dropping the “no more high school” bombshell. Luckily, Ali seemed to know that there was no margin for error in our current predicament—and no way that any of us should give the psychics an opportunity to divide and conquer.

  Still, impending disaster or no impending disaster, the twins had undoubtedly been up for hours, and Ali was probably on the verge of venturing into my bedroom. She was already uncomfortable with the intensity of my relationship with Chase. Somehow, I doubted her finding him in my bed would help matters, even if we did have the mother of all excuses.

  You have to leave, I told Chase. Now.

  He twisted to face me, his posture relaxing, the light, playful smile returning to his face. I was used to the give-and-take between the boy and the wolf inside, but I was still struck by the combined effect of his bed-head and our current situation. For the first time since he’d come back from patrol, Chase seemed like he belonged here, body and mind—not just with me, but at the Wayfarer. Like this was home.

  I should go, Bryn.

  His voice was a whisper in my mind, and I wondered if I’d projected my thoughts to him—if home, like Thanksgiving, was something he’d thought of only in the abstract. Without saying another word to me, silently or out loud, Chase slid off the bed and began walking toward the window, and every instinct in my body said to follow.

  Then there was a tentative knock on my bedroom door, and every instinct I had said to cover.

  “Just a second!” I called. Ali opened the door, just a crack. Once she had ascertained that I was not, in fact, naked, she pushed it the rest of the way open and came in.

  I had never in my life been so grateful for werewolf speed. Chase was gone before Ali’s eyes had a chance to register that he’d ever been there. Unfortunately, Ali had the uncanny ability to look at me and know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was hiding something.

  “Sleep well?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  I had two choices: evade the question and pique her curiosity enough that she’d keep digging around until she figured out what was setting off her mom sense, or distract her with the least damning portion of the truth.

  “I slept well this morning, but last night was rough.”

  “Was it?” Ali asked, glancing around my room and noting the blanket that Lucas had left on my floor.

  “Lucas came by,” I said. She would have found out eventually anyway; this wasn’t the kind of thing I could hide from the pack, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ignore. Wanting to help Lucas and giving him free rein of our territory were two different things, and I couldn’t help that Chase’s words had dug their way into my mind. Lucas was a loose cannon. Desperate people did desperate things, and desperate werewolves were a thousand times worse.

  Especially when they showed up in your bedroom alone at night.

  “I know he’s scared,” I said, “and it’s not like I’ve been able to give him an answer, but …”

  “But he broke into a foreign alpha’s house and could have killed you in your sleep?” Ali was taking this about as well as could be expected—which is to say, not well at all. “Most alphas would kill him. Callum would cage him.”

  I knew exactly what Ali thought about the werewolf version of justice. She was the voice in my head telling me that violence—that kind of violence—was never okay.

  I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “I’m leaning more towards asking Devon and Lake to shadow his every move.”

  Between Lake’s trigger finger and Devon’s fondness for show tunes, that seemed like a harsh enough incentive to walk the straight and narrow to me.

  “Seems reasonable,” Ali agreed, “but it might not be a bad idea for you to take on a shadow yourself.”

  Ali judiciously avoided meeting my gaze as she said those words. In the entire history of my life, I’d never once willingly agreed to lupine bodyguards—not that my agreement had ever been necessary before. In Callum’s pack, my refusal had been cause for amusement more than anything else, but now the decision was mine.

  “I need you to do this for me,” Ali said, and I knew by her tone that it wasn’t a request.

  Correction, I thought, the decision is technically mine.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll have Devon, Lake, Maddy, and Chase rotate through: half on me, half on Lucas, anytime I’m on the property.”

  “You planning on leaving sometime soon?” Ali asked. I’d expected her to pick up on that, but I’d also expected her to be adamantly against it. Instead, her voice was guarded, like she knew something I didn’t.

  Maybe multiple somethings.

  “I don’t know what I’m planning on doing,” I said honestly. “But I’m getting the distinct feeling that you do.”

  Ali pressed her lips together for a moment and then she spoke. “I called Callum this morning.”

  Like mother, like daughter—Callum was never far from my mind and never far from hers. The difference was that I’d come to terms with the things Callum had done to set me on the path to becoming the Cedar Ridge alpha, and Ali probably never would. She’d loved Callum, the same way I had, but she’d never cared that he was the alpha. She’d fought him—and me—every time I’d started thinking and acting more Were than human.

  He’d promised her once that she’d have the final word on my safety, and in Ali’s eyes, he’d broken that promise and then some.

  “You called Callum?” I asked, watching a bevy of emotions and vulnerability flash across her face until she pressed back against them.

  “I was worried, and in his own way, he … cares … about you.”

  I thought about the Callum in my dream—mute and hovering just out of reach. “Did Callum actually answer the phone, or did he have Sora do it?”

  Ali gave me a strange look. “He answered. Why?”

  “No reason. Is he the one who told you I needed guards?”

  Ali shrugged. “I believe his exact words were ‘If she was living in my territory, I’d have half my pack watching her back.’ ”

  Even from a distance, Callum was still controlling parts of my life. The fact that he couldn’t be bothered to answer my phone calls was just salt in the wound.

  I
didn’t bother to bite back the sarcasm in my reply to Ali. “Did he round out the conversation by giving you cryptic warnings or promising to send you presents with some kind of secret meaning that you absolutely and without question won’t understand?”

  “No,” Ali said, dragging the word out and tilting her head to the side. She waited to see if I would elaborate, and when I didn’t, she did. “He did say that it was best if the two of you had no direct contact for the time being, and that he couldn’t advise me on how this should be handled or things could go very badly.”

  “What a drama queen,” I muttered, eliciting an incredulous laugh from Ali. “I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen if he helps me out here? The apocalypse?”

  “A high probability of civil war,” Ali corrected. “Or so says the drama queen.”

  I just loved it when my worst-case scenario went from bad to horrific. The precarious democracy in the werewolf Senate was a stick of dynamite, waiting to go off. I had no desire to be the one to strike the match.

  “So in summation, his only suggestion was putting half the pack on Bryn Babysitting Duty, and he can’t do anything to help us directly without inciting a chain of events that might lead to a future he doesn’t want.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Ali said in a voice that suggested it wasn’t much consolation to her, “I think the part of him that’s actually human wishes that he could help. It’s just not a very big part. Not anymore.”

  I wasn’t about to touch Ali’s Callum issues with a ten-foot pole. “In other not-helpful news,” I told her, “I got a visit from one of the psychics again last night.”

  Ali’s entire body went tense. “And you didn’t lead with that?” she asked tersely. “Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

  In retrospect, I had to consider the possibility that telling Ali this was a mistake. For whatever reason, psychics were a sore spot with her. I should have known she wouldn’t take the idea of a nighttime invasion lying down.

  “I’m fine. One of them just has a nasty habit of showing up in my dreams. At least this time, he came alone.”