Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Lake tilted her head to one side, clearly considering the option. “You really think you can do this?” she asked me.

  I didn’t bother tiptoeing around the truth. “I don’t know.”

  Lake nodded, and for a second, she was the spitting image of her dad. “When you figure it out, I suspect you’ll let us know?”

  That was Lake-ese for “deal me in or die a slow and painful death.” She wanted a promise that I wouldn’t run off behind their backs, that I wouldn’t do anything until I had a plan, and that once I had a plan, she and Dev would be the first to know.

  “Bryn?” Dev parked the car, and his voice broke into my thoughts. The part of me that was alpha wanted to respond, to tell them both to back off, to take a lifetime of friendship and turn it into something else.

  I ground my teeth and shook my head.

  The three of us had always watched out for each other. Always. I wasn’t going to let what I was change that, change me. Our pack wasn’t like other packs. I wasn’t like other alphas.

  That was it.

  The idea came to me fully formed, like it had been in my head all along, and I just hadn’t unearthed it until now.

  “Hey, Lake?”

  She grinned. “Would I be right in thinking that you’ve got everything figured out?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you really think you can do this?”

  “Yup.”

  “By Jove,” Devon said, reading between the lines of my one-word answers, “I believe the lady has a plan.”

  For the first time since Lucas had shown up at the Wayfarer, I really felt like I did.

  This time, I was the last one to the clearing. The moon wasn’t full. The pack was sleeping, and those of us who weren’t hadn’t come here to run.

  “Our pack isn’t like other packs.” My words appeared as wisps of white in the night air and echoed through the forest. The moon provided scant light, but even in the darkness, I could make out every detail of each of their faces.

  Waiting.

  Ready.

  “We chose each other. When it counted, when the stakes were high, when no one else was there, you three had my back. You all gave up another life, another future, a hundred thousand things that might have been, and you did that for me, without even thinking, without questioning, without batting an eye.”

  For a time, after I’d broken off my connection with Callum’s pack, but before we’d had our standoff with the Rabid, it had been just the four of us: Lake, Chase, Devon, and me. Later, there were others, and no matter where I went or what I did, the others’ names would always be etched into my soul, their well-being my first priority—but in the beginning, before we knew what it meant or what any of us were on the cusp of doing, there were four of us.

  And there was no alpha.

  “If something happens to me—tonight, tomorrow, five years from now, I know that you guys will take care of the others.” I met Dev’s eyes for a second and then closed mine. “You’d take care of each other.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to you.” Devon was the one who said the words, but I felt the intensity with which he’d issued them emanating from all three. It should have been suffocating, but instead, it warmed me, held me, sent a charge racing along the surface of my skin.

  The whites of Chase’s eyes caught the moonlight just so, and for a moment, I felt something animal and raw staring back at me.

  I met his gaze head-on. I felt it down to the tips of my toes.

  “Nothing is going to happen to me.” I repeated Devon’s words. “Because no matter what, the three of you would never let anything happen to me. It’s not supposed to work that way, because I’m the alpha, and that means that I’m supposed to be the one protecting you.”

  My chest tightened, and the cold air cut into my lungs with each breath. I could sense their wolves, just below the surface. I could see the tension in their neck muscles and feel the adrenaline snaking its way from vein to vein.

  “I’m not like other alphas.” The words slipped off my tongue almost as a confession, rather than a statement of pride, but I wasn’t here looking for absolution. I was here to make what I was—and what they were to me—work for us, instead of against us.

  They wanted to protect me. They would always want to protect me, and admitting that I might need their help, that I might need to be protected, didn’t have to mean giving up the idea that I could keep the rest of the pack safe.

  It just gave me another way to do it.

  In the past six months, I’d learned that being alpha meant knowing everything about everyone. It meant that at any second on any day, I could tell you where every last member of my pack was, what they were doing, what they were feeling. I didn’t push them. I didn’t pry. But I was always there: in the things Chase would never tell another living person, in the way Maddy felt the first time she saw Lucas, in the quiet moments when Lake did nothing but run.

  They could speak to me silently. I could make myself heard in their minds, but our pack-bond wasn’t exactly a two-way street. I was the alpha and they were my pack, and nature hadn’t designed werewolves to know their alpha the way he knew them.

  She, I corrected myself silently. I wasn’t male. I wasn’t a werewolf, and there was nothing in the rule book to say that I couldn’t make it a two-way street.

  I stepped forward, my head bowed—not in submission, but in something closer to prayer. I brought one hand to Lake’s cheek and another to Devon’s. I brushed the side of my face against Chase’s neck. I closed my eyes, and I let go.

  For this moment, in this private midnight congress, I didn’t have to be alpha. I didn’t have to be the strong one. Chase had tried telling me that. So had Ali. For the first time, I could almost believe it—believe that I didn’t have to fight this battle alone.

  I felt their breath on my skin. Heat leapt from their bodies to mine, and for all the perfect silence of the forest, the sounds inside my head rose.

  I let out a ragged breath, pushing down the animal desire to howl. The scars on my hip bone felt like lines of liquid fire against my skin, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to control the bond.

  I let it control me.

  I let them in.

  I didn’t say anything to them. I let them see it for themselves: everything I thought, everything I felt. I let them sift through my mind, and with the part of me that was alpha screaming, I forced my body still, until the muscles in the back of my neck melted away, leaving my head lying on Chase’s shoulder, the way it had when he’d spent the night.

  Devon nuzzled my right palm. Lake brought the tips of her fingers to touch my face. My mind and my body and every part of my being were so full of the three of them—what they were and what we were together—that there wasn’t room for anything else.

  Anyone else.

  Being alpha meant always being inside everyone else’s heads and never letting them inside yours, protecting the pack and never needing their protection—but it also meant that if the coven got inside my head, they’d have free access to everyone else’s.

  Not anymore.

  “When Chase spent the night, Archer couldn’t find me in my dreams.” I heard the words as I whispered them, felt the soft sound wrapping its way around each of their bodies. “If we’re lucky, having the three of you inside me will be enough to keep all of them out.”

  And what if it’s not, Bryn? I recognized Lake’s voice in my mind, and for a split second, I saw an image of the two of us when we were eight or nine, suntanned and skinny-limbed and laughing.

  I brought my hand to Lake’s and pressed my nails into the skin of her wrist, dragging them softly downward, leaving my mark.

  You’re going to protect me, I told her, the way you always have, and if it doesn’t work, you’re going to protect the pack.

  It wasn’t an order, but it wasn’t a question, either, because I knew them, and they knew me, and there wasn’t a single one of us who didn’t already know how this was g
oing to end.

  Lake met my eyes, her own blazing, and then left her mark on my palm. The exchange was symbolic, the kind of formality our pack had never observed, but somehow, my dominance spreading among the four of us, their inner wolves as much a presence in my mind as theirs, it seemed appropriate.

  Devon.

  Chase.

  Two more times, my fingers laid marks into someone else’s skin. Two more times, marks were laid upon me. When we finished here, I’d go into the lion’s den to take out the lion, knowing that I wasn’t alone, that if something happened to me, my friends would take care of our pack, even if it meant hurting me.

  With the wind whipping through my hair, I knelt and lifted my head to the waning moon. I breathed. They breathed. And when they Shifted, and I felt the rush of wild power, bittersweet and pure, I wondered if this time, they felt me in the same way I felt them.

  If being a part of me made them just a little bit more human.

  I was still alpha. I always would be, but the constant rhythm in their minds as I buried my hands in their fur wasn’t alpha. It was Bryn.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I SHOWED UP ON THE COVEN’S FRONT PORCH LOOKING every inch the runaway. My hair was a tangled mess, my clothes still smudged with forest dirt. My teeth were chattering, and I had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder.

  Ali was going to kill me.

  Waltzing straight into the belly of the beast wasn’t exactly a mother-approved kind of plan. In a few hours, when Ali woke up and found me gone, there would be hell to pay, and I was seriously glad that I wouldn’t be the one around to pay it. I was only about 60 percent sure that Lake and Devon would be able to keep her from charging in after me—and only the fact that my friends had open access to my mind and would know the second things went south made me rate their chances that high.

  This is what Callum foresaw, I thought, willing the words to be true. I’m supposed to be here. Ali will understand that.

  My friends snorted inside my head in stereo. I wasn’t convincing anybody here—not even myself.

  Feeling as if my body weren’t entirely my own, I lifted my right hand, fisted it, and knocked on the wooden door. The coven had set themselves up on the far side of town, in a falling-down farmhouse that had been abandoned for years. I lifted my fist to knock again, but the door opened before I could repeat the motion. I shivered, half from the cold and half because the wolves lurking in the corners of my brain didn’t like the looks of the woman staring me directly in the eyes.

  She was older than I’d expected. Werewolves aged slowly, and most of them never looked much older than their thirties, so seeing eyes that were worn around the edges and lips that had thinned with age was an unusual experience for me, especially when the owner of those eyes and lips felt alpha in a way completely at odds with the fact that she was human.

  “Bryn.” She said my name like she’d been expecting me, like everything up until this point had been her way of luring me in.

  “Hello.” I didn’t give her more than I had to, and I watched her face for some clue as to what was going on inside her head. “You’re Caroline’s mother.”

  She smiled, and for a moment, it was easy to picture her as one of those PTA soccer moms.

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Valerie.”

  The expression in her eyes never changed, but I felt it the moment she reached out to my mind, like a cube of ice sliding down the length of my spine. Her smile was gentle and warm, and just looking at her made me want to smile, too.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead, I concentrated on the shiver that ran through my body and the sound of wolves breathing heavily in my head.

  Lake and Devon and Chase.

  Valerie’s smile deepened. Her eyes glittered, and without another word, she moved aside, gesturing for me to step across the splintered threshold into the house.

  She’d tried to get inside my head, to push me to trust her or fear her or whatever it was she’d had in store for my emotions, and she’d failed. She knew I wasn’t really there to join them. I knew that she knew, just like I was fully cognizant of the likelihood that she would keep trying to find a way into my head. The two of us were dancing, playing chess.

  I stepped across the threshold.

  “I was wondering how long it would take you to come to me,” Valerie said, her voice soft, comforting. “Bridget and Archer told me that you had an episode in town. It’s only natural that you’d have questions about what you are. What we are.”

  The way she said the word might have made me feel like there really was a we, but for the unwavering certainty that I was already part of something bigger.

  “I’ve done a pretty good job figuring things out for myself,” I said. “Good enough that all three of your people ended up on the ground.”

  “You’re a fighter.” The edges of her lips tilted up in amusement. “No control. No forethought. Things go red around the edges, and you start cutting people down. It’s hardly surprising.”

  “Because I was raised by werewolves?”

  Valerie didn’t as much as blink at the word. The other members of the coven might feel blind fury whenever the species came up, but she wasn’t bothered by it.

  Odd, considering that a werewolf had killed her husband.

  “No, not because you were raised by werewolves, though I shudder to think of the effect that might have had on some with your natural proclivities.” Valerie reached forward and brushed a strand of my hair out of my face, a gesture so maternal—and so familiar—that I felt like I’d been slapped. “Most psychics require practice to hone their craft. The more you practice, the stronger you become.”

  For a single, jarring second, I could feel her again, coming at me from all sides—pressure at my temples, the slightest hint of a suggestion: confusion, loneliness, yearning.

  Yeah, right.

  Valerie’s eyes narrowed. “People with your particular gift tend to be a bit more … feral about things. Reining it in won’t make you more powerful, but it will give you choices, about when and how your ability manifests itself.”

  My heart pounded in my ears, and when she stepped forward and took my chin in her hands, the only thing that kept me from going into fight-or-flight mode, from throwing her to the ground and giving in to the desire to escape, was the calming sound of other hearts, beating in other chests.

  Chase’s eyes.

  Lake running in a blur of white-blonde fur.

  Dev.

  They pulled me back from the edge. I brought one hand to my hip, laying my fingers over the scars underneath my clothes and feeling the light scratches on the surface of my hands.

  “You’ve known other Resilients?” I asked calmly.

  After a long, considering moment, Valerie let go of my chin. “Resilients?”

  “People like me.”

  “You sound surprised.” She tilted her head to the side, and her voice went from honey sweet to ice sharp in a moment. “Surely you didn’t think you were one of a kind?”

  I couldn’t keep myself from snorting out loud. One of a kind? Me? Any human who’d ever survived a werewolf attack major enough to trigger the Change was, by definition, Resilient. As it happened, I had an entire pack of them back at the Wayfarer. I had no illusions whatsoever about being unique.

  Of course, no one outside our pack knew that the secret to making new werewolves was to choose your victims very carefully. Shay didn’t know what separated the Changed Weres in my pack from the ones who’d been born that way, and he couldn’t tell Valerie what he didn’t know.

  Advantage: us.

  “As it so happens, there’s a man in our coven who shares your gift,” Valerie said.

  I ingested that information, absorbed it, and kept my surprise from showing on my face. I’d met other Resilients, but by the time I’d met them, they’d already been Changed. I’d never met a human like me. I’d never even considered that there had to be others.

  “His name is Je
d,” Valerie continued. “He might be able to teach you a thing or two about control—that is, if you plan to stay?”

  Of course I planned to stay. Just like I planned to learn everything I could about the coven, to choose my moment, and to use the tranq gun hiding in my boot to knock Valerie out long enough to put the rest of them through emotion detox.

  “Will I be safe if I stay here?” I asked, knowing I might get more information out of what she didn’t say than what she did.

  “I don’t make a practice of attacking my own kind, Bryn. We generally consider that type of thing to be a last resort.”

  Her eyes flickered to my right, and I followed her gaze and realized that Caroline was standing there, a shape in the shadows, her arms at her sides. This time, I felt more than a chill as Valerie pushed at my emotions.

  Threat.

  I’d always felt it in Caroline’s presence. Valerie wanted me to feel it more. She wanted me to look at Caroline and think last resort. She wanted me to wonder who else Caroline had attacked at her mother’s request.

  Even as I fought back against Valerie’s interference, I couldn’t help noticing the icy calm on Caroline’s face, the absolute readiness, the blackness that bled outward from her pupils as she stared at me, set her sights on me.

  Lake and Chase and Dev. Pack.

  Whatever entry Valerie had found into my subconscious, the others pushed her out, prowling the halls of my mind like creatures on the hunt.

  “I’m staying,” I said.

  Valerie smiled. “I was hoping you would.” She glanced toward the shadows and lifted one eyebrow. “Caroline will show you to your room.”

  Caroline moved silently, each step measured, not a single hair falling out of place. She walked past me, and I saw a glint of metal as the lamplight caught the blade concealed in her left hand just so.

  Lake.

  Devon.

  Chase.

  I could do this. I would do this.

  As Caroline and I began to climb up the battered staircase, Valerie’s voice drowned out the sound of creaking wood. “Sleep well, Bryn.”