Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I picked up the phone. I dialed.

  “Hello.”

  One word. Just one—but the moment I heard Callum’s voice, I had to sit down.

  “This is the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack,” I said, my voice shaking with the things I wasn’t saying. “We have a situation with some humans, and from one alpha to another, I need some advice.”

  “Bryn.” That was all he said—my name—but it was enough to make me feel absolutely naked, like he could see the expression on my face, like he could see inside me, no matter how far away he was.

  “Callum.” A hint of steel crept into my voice. This wasn’t a social call.

  “Did you get my gift?”

  “Yes.” I paused. “I don’t suppose it means that the key to the coven’s destruction is horses.”

  Callum made a choking sound, and I wondered if I’d actually managed to surprise a laugh out of him.

  “This is serious, Callum. We have kids here. Katie. Alex. A half dozen others under the age of ten. Ali’s packing them up as we speak.”

  “And where are you sending them?”

  There was only one place I could send them, one person I could trust with their safety. Callum had to know that.

  Had to know that it was him.

  “I’ll get them out of the line of fire however I can.” I danced around the truth.

  “And how many escorts will you be sending with your little ones?” Callum did a passable job of sounding curious, but I wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t asking for his benefit.

  He was asking for mine, and I realized almost immediately that I couldn’t send the kids off by themselves—and that I didn’t have many guards to spare. Counting the peripherals, and me, we had ten able-bodied fighters—eleven if Lucas could heal enough to fight by our side. I couldn’t spare more than one or two to escort the kids, and that wasn’t good enough, not when the coven—or, if he was up for risking the Senate’s wrath, Shay—could feasibly intercept them along the way.

  “I’ll send the kids into lockdown here,” I told Callum, thinking out loud. “If we fight the psychics, there’ll probably be casualties, but to get to the kids, they’d have to take us all out, and I don’t think they have that kind of manpower, knacks or not.”

  “Who do you think they’ll kill?”

  If I hadn’t known Callum, hadn’t spent my entire life reading meaning into his most indecipherable tones, I would have thought the question was facetious, but it wasn’t.

  He wanted names.

  “You’d know better than I would,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

  Callum didn’t respond. I couldn’t even hear him breathing on the other side of the line, but werewolf hearing probably meant that he could hear the beating of my heart, the sound I made each time I swallowed.

  “There are eleven of us,” I said, “assuming the wolf I just won from Shay can fight.” I didn’t mention that this assumption was stretching it, given Lucas’s current condition—and his previous experience with the psychics. “Chase, Maddy, and the peripherals are … scrappy.”

  Like me, they had a way of surviving things that should have killed them dead.

  “Devon’s Dev, and I don’t even know how old Mitch is.”

  That left Lake. I’d already almost lost her once.

  To Shay.

  Thinking of the way Shay had looked at her, the expression on his face, made me remember exactly who and what Lake was. She was a female Were—one of very, very few, even with the addition of Changed Weres in my pack. Shay wouldn’t want her dead. If she died—if any of the females died—the hope that any of the alphas would be able to get their hands on them—now, a year from now, a hundred years from now—died, too.

  “They won’t kill the females.”

  I measured Callum’s response to my words.

  Silence.

  “The psychics have a deal with Shay,” I said, working through the logic out loud. “And Shay would want the females alive.”

  The number of people Shay wanted dead was probably relatively small: me; Mitch if he got in the way; depending on Shay’s mood, maybe Devon …

  “This isn’t war,” I said softly, unsure if I was talking to Callum or myself. “It’s a hit.”

  Slowly, the layers of Shay’s plan crystallized in my mind. He’d set the psychics up to attack us. He’d offered me help, hoping to gain access to our territory, and when I’d refused …

  “You could die, Bryn.” Callum confirmed my thoughts, and for the first time, I heard emotion in his words. It was faint, but it was there, and though I had to strain to hear it, once I did, something inside me, something broken, began putting itself back together again, bit by bit by bit.

  “I could die,” I repeated. “If I do, Devon will go alpha.”

  There was no doubt of that in my mind; with Dev, it was only a matter of time.

  “Devon could die,” Callum said softly.

  “And if Devon died …” I forced myself to imagine it. I was the alpha; Dev was my second-in-command. If we were both dead—

  “There’s not an obvious third,” I said.

  There were two ways to become alpha: as a member of a given pack, you could challenge and kill the current alpha and take their rank, or, if the alpha was killed by an outsider, you could be strong enough that there was never any question that you would be next in line. Mitch was too peripheral to lead. Lake, Chase, and Maddy—they all had their natural strengths, but the hierarchy between them was far from clear, and unlike most Weres, my pack wouldn’t jump straight to fighting it out for supremacy.

  In the time it took for them to reach a consensus, they’d be easy targets.

  Sitting ducks.

  Open.

  “Senate Law forbids taking another alpha’s wolf,” I said slowly. “But if there’s no alpha, then technically, there isn’t a pack.”

  If the psychics killed me, if they killed Devon, there would be an opening, however brief, for someone else to come rushing in.

  I thought of Shay’s wolves, lined up and down the edge of our border. Waiting.

  “Dev can’t fight,” I said, coming to a conclusion that crept under my skin and hung in the air all around me. “If I fight, Devon can’t, and I have to fight.”

  Callum didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. I was the alpha, and an alpha couldn’t run and hide, couldn’t send the pack off to fight, die on their own. The pack needed me there, the same way the peripherals had needed to see me when they’d arrived at the Wayfarer, the same way the others looked to me for the signal to run on the full moon.

  “In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them, you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are. It’s lonely. It’s impossible. It’s all-consuming.”

  It is what it is.

  Callum didn’t say it. Neither did I. But it was there, between us. And it was true.

  “Okay,” I said, fighting for acceptance the way a drowning man tries for air. “Devon can’t fight. I can’t risk sending the kids away, because someone could intercept them before they get to you. During the actual confrontation, the coven will be gunning for me, and they’ll be under orders from Shay not to kill any of the female Weres.”

  Granted, Callum hadn’t said any of that. He’d just sat there, on the other end of the line, asking questions and letting me come to it on my own.

  “Now I just need a plan for neutralizing the coven as quickly as possible,” I said. “Any idea if taking out their leader will free up the others’ minds?”

  Callum didn’t respond.

  “Callum? Words of wisdom? Cryptic hints? Anything?”

  Nothing. No answer. Silence.

  And that was when I realized he’d already hung up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AS I STALKED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND BACK TOWARD the restaurant, my mind jumped from one thought to another, a never-ending medley of the th
ings Callum had said, the promised confrontation with the psychics, and Jed’s suggestion that the only way to stop Valerie was to kill her. I thought of the carving Callum had sent me, and remembered all the times growing up that I’d seen him with a piece of wood in his hands. I remembered “borrowing” his knife when I was eight, trying to carve something myself. If Ali had been the one to catch me unsupervised with the sharp object, she would have freaked, but Callum had just sat down behind me and pulled me onto his lap. He’d put his hands over mine, guiding them, ready to catch the blade if it slipped.

  Was that why he’d sent it to me? To let me know that even now, he was doing the same thing? Or was the message really that he couldn’t do that anymore, that this time, if the knife slipped, I’d bleed?

  Hurt.

  Die.

  “You okay?” Chase fell into step with me, and I felt his presence the way I always did, in my flesh and bones: a flash of similarity, a desire for the space between us to disappear.

  This time, I kept my distance.

  “Lucas is healing. He seems a little more … present now. Maddy’s with him.” Chase paused, and I could feel him debating whether to continue. “He’s asking for you.”

  Getting out of Snake Bend had been only half of Lucas’s goal; he’d said from the beginning that he wanted to be a part of our pack, and now, with Shay out of the way, there was nothing to keep me from giving Lucas his wish.

  Except, of course, for the fact that the psychics might pick any moment to descend.

  “It can wait,” Chase said, and even though I’d been thinking more or less the same thing, coming from him, it chafed—maybe because I couldn’t help remembering that he’d used that same soft, quiet tone to tell me that even if we lost Lake, it would be okay.

  It wouldn’t have been okay. And neither would I.

  “Shay wants the females alive.” I changed the subject—out loud and in my head. “That’s the good news.”

  “You’ll make the girls our first line of defense, then.” After my one-sided conversation with Callum, Chase actually answering me made for a pleasant change of pace. “If Maddy, Lake, Phoebe, and Sage take the perimeter, then the psychics will have to work their way back to the rest of us with less than lethal force. It’s a good plan, Bryn. It buys the rest of us some time.”

  “Not all of us.”

  “The bad news?” Chase guessed.

  I nodded. “I’m going to ask Dev not to fight.”

  I expected Chase to ask why. He didn’t.

  “He won’t say yes.” Chase didn’t—wouldn’t—look at me, but even from this angle, I could see that his expression had gone carefully neutral.

  “Devon won’t be happy about it,” I corrected. “But he’ll do it.”

  Maybe that was the difference between Chase and Dev. Neither one of them wanted to see me hurt. They both would have died for me, the same way I would have died for them. They felt an animal need to protect me, and always had—but at the end of the day, Dev felt that way about other things, too. He would have gone to Shay’s pack to protect Lake. He’d stand down on this fight for the good of the pack.

  “Dev will do it,” I said, taking a page from Chase’s book and staring straight ahead. “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Bryn,” Chase said, reaching for my arm, his touch light against my skin.

  “Would it even matter,” I asked him, feeling that touch to my core, “if I told you it was what I wanted? If it was what needed to happen for us to know that the pack was going to come out of this okay?”

  To his credit, Chase didn’t hesitate before he answered. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. “No.”

  “Well,” I said roughly, “then I guess it’s a good thing I’m not asking you.”

  Chase’s hand tightened, ever so slightly, his touch turning to a hold. He stopped walking, and I turned to face him.

  “If it came down to me or the pack,” Chase said, his face giving away nothing, his mind calm and cool on the other end of the bond, “what would you choose?”

  I tried to process the fact that he was even asking, that from his perspective, in his mind, that was even okay.

  “You’d choose the pack,” Chase said. He moved his hand from my arm to my chin, angling my eyes gently toward him. “I know that, Bryn. I’m okay with it, and I will never ask you to choose.”

  I searched his eyes, wishing that I could smell the truth on him, the way he could on me.

  “If it ever comes down to a choice between me and the pack, I want you to choose them. Don’t think about it, don’t second-guess it, don’t feel guilty after the fact. I know you, Bryn. I know you, and I am not asking you to change.” His lips curved upward in a slow, sad smile, and I thought about what Callum had said about being alpha—it was lonely, it was impossible, it was all-consuming.

  Chase brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “But at the end of the day, Bryn, if I had to choose between you and the pack, I would choose you—every single time, no questions asked. You need to know that, because that’s who I am, and it’s not going to change. Not now, not ever. For me, it will always, always be you, even if deep down, you wish I could be something or someone else.”

  Standing there, looking at Chase and listening to him say something I hadn’t even allowed myself to think, I knew objectively that I wasn’t being fair. That I couldn’t expect the pack to matter to him the way it did to me. That he had accepted what I was, even though it meant that he would never be my number-one priority, the way I was his.

  I knew it wasn’t fair to him to expect more than that, but with everything that had happened in the past few days—with everything that was on the verge of happening even now—I couldn’t convince myself that mattered.

  I would always choose the pack. Chase would always choose me—and I wasn’t sure I could accept that, fair or not.

  Unable to think, to breathe, I brushed my lips lightly over his, pretending for a moment that the two of us were the only people in the world, and then I turned and ran for the Wayfarer, where we weren’t.

  “Are you actually asking me to let you go out there and fight the coven alone?” Dev’s voice was surprisingly pleasant. He shifted his gaze from me to Chase, who’d followed on my heels, and raised his eyebrows in a look meant to convey that I was crazy.

  Ignoring said look, I tried to stay focused on the task at hand. “The coven is working for Shay. Shay wants our females, so he set the coven up to take me out of the picture without irreparably damaging the girls. Once I’m gone, you’re next in line for alpha, Dev. Think about it. Shay would have taken you in exchange for Lucas—is he really that sentimental, or do you think he just wanted you out of the way?”

  “Touché,” Devon said. His mother had beaten me unconscious at Callum’s command. His brother had tortured a wolf under his care. The Macalisters weren’t really a family known for their sentimentality.

  “Dev, if you stay and the coven kills both of us, Shay will sweep in and pick the females off one by one. Is that what you want for Lake? For Maddy? For Katie and Lily and—”

  “Enough.” Devon held up one palm in a gesture that looked so choreographed, I almost smiled. “You’ve convinced me that only one of us can fight.”

  “So you’ll take Ali and the kids and hunker down somewhere safe until the threat has passed?”

  Dev snorted. “Not for all the tea in China. Not for front-row seats at Fashion Week. Not for a featured role on Glee.”

  I snorted right back at him. “Tell me how you really feel, Dev.”

  “You’re the alpha. That means that you have to come first. And like it or not, you’re human, and that means you’re—”

  “Breakable?” I suggested, the word Shay had used dripping sarcastically from my own lips. “I’m also Resilient. What happens when Valerie starts messing with your emotions? Or when Bridget whistles a little ditty that turns you from teen wolf into a sitting duck? Lucas said one of the psychics can control
wolves. What happens if you can’t fight her off?”

  Devon’s jaw snapped shut, and for once, he was absolutely silent. I waited, my eyes locked on his, his locked on mine, and after a long moment, he nodded. He wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t admit that there was even the smallest possibility that I was right, but he would take the younger kids and go, because I’d asked.

  He would do what had to be done, even if it killed him. Even if it killed me.

  He’d do it for the pack.

  “Well, this is nice and cozy.”

  If the circumstances had been different, it might have been gratifying to see the way the boys jumped then, given that I’d spent most of my life with werewolves sneaking up on me, but the person who’d gotten the drop on them was standing with her back against the opposite wall, a gun in her hand, blonde hair concealing the left half of her face.

  “Caroline.”

  She shrugged, like my saying her name was an accusation—one to which she was completely indifferent.

  “Did you come here to warn us?” Devon asked, putting melodramatic emphasis on the word. Swooping in to issue her mother’s ultimatums was more or less Caroline’s MO.

  “I don’t know why I came here,” Caroline said, looking down at the gun. “But if you want to take it as a warning, that works. My mother won’t be able to hold the others back much longer.”

  “Hold them back,” I repeated. “Yeah. Right.”

  “You couldn’t make it easy,” Caroline said, ignoring my sarcasm. “You couldn’t just give us that thing and walk away.”

  “That thing as in Chase?” I asked, following her gaze to my left, where Chase was eyeing Caroline with detached objectivity, even as his lupine nature became more apparent in his posture, his expression, the feel of his mind.

  “Or that thing as in Lucas?” I continued. “Maybe you’d like my baby sister? She’s not quite a year old yet, but she’s a holy horror when she doesn’t get her way.”

  “You’re like them,” Caroline told me, her pupils beginning to bleed outward as she stepped away from the shadows. “You’re just like them.”