Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Why was I letting this get to me? I’d known from the moment I’d survived Shay’s last attempt on my life that he would have another plan, and another, and another. I’d known I’d have to see him again face-to-face, that I’d have to play politics when I wanted nothing more than to tear out his throat. But the idea of doing it in a room full of alphas who felt the same way about me that Shay did, who had voted to let the last four-legged psychopath get away with it because human lives—my life, Chase’s, the lives of innocent children, my parents’—weren’t worth much when you stacked them up against the secret to making female Weres?

  That made me sick.

  Natural-born female werewolves were rare enough that the other alphas would have let the rabid wolf who killed my parents keep right on killing, so long as he delivered on his promise to supply them with a constant flow of girls who’d been born human and Changed into Weres.

  Now both the Rabid and the secret to pulling off that trick were buried, and as far as Shay and the other alphas were concerned, that was my fault. If they’d had any idea I knew what the last Rabid had known, that Callum knew—

  Bryn.

  I heard Chase in my mind long before I sensed his physical approach. The closer he got, the further away everything else seemed—the knowledge that this time tomorrow, I’d be headed for a Senate meeting; the unwanted memories; the frustration and rage and worry that wouldn’t do me a speck of good. Instead, I felt Chase. His presence. His thoughts.

  Even when I shut my mind off to the rest of the pack, Chase was there.

  He wasn’t strong the way Devon was, or as brash and fearless as Lake. He didn’t understand me—or my priorities—the way someone with alpha instincts would have, and if it hadn’t been for me, he would have left our little pack long ago—but Chase excelled at being there. Physically, emotionally, he was there and he was steady, and I didn’t question, even for a second, that he’d love me just the same no matter what I said or did or felt or didn’t feel.

  Sitting very still, I closed my eyes and waited. Waited until Chase’s presence wasn’t just a shadow over my mind. Waited until I could feel his breath on my face, until I could smell him, cedar and cinnamon and home.

  I opened my eyes. There he was, inches away from me, close enough to touch. The constant hum of the shower faded into the background. I let go of the barriers in my mind. In an instant, everything that had happened passed from my mind to Chase’s. My hands found their way to the sides of his face. My palms were warm with the heat of his skin, and I concentrated on that—on feeling him, touching him—and not thinking about what tomorrow might bring.

  “Shay’s going to call?” Chase asked, leaning into my touch.

  I nodded. “Callum said we’ll have a few hours after the call comes in before we’ll need to leave. Sora will be joining him at the edge of Snake Bend territory. I’ll be taking Dev.”

  Chase didn’t stiffen, didn’t react in any way, but I could feel in the pit of my stomach that he hated not being the one to go with me. He had no desire to fight Devon for dominance; he would never treat me as if I were some kind of prize to be won, but Chase didn’t like the idea of my walking headlong into danger without him.

  He didn’t like knowing that there were times when he couldn’t have my back.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and somehow, saying the words to Chase made them feel true. “I can do this.”

  A rueful half smile cut across the boyish features of his face. “Of course you can.”

  He pressed his lips into my palm, and I heard the rest of his words in my mind, felt them in the surface of my skin.

  But if you don’t want to, he continued silently.

  Chase would never understand that what I wanted didn’t matter. Not to me, not the way it would to any other girl.

  I’d wanted to help Lucas.…

  There was no room for emotion in my decision-making process. No wanting, no feeling, no anger, no grief.

  “Okay,” Chase said softly, murmuring the words into my hair. “Okay, Bryn.”

  He wasn’t pushing, wasn’t asking me to change, but I knew he wanted me to have choices that I would never have. I couldn’t blame him for that—not when he was willing to give up his choices for me.

  But it would have been nice, really nice, if being together hadn’t required that kind of sacrifice. If neither of us had known, in skin and bones and blood-deep certainty, that I would always come first for Chase, and the pack would always come first for me.

  “Love you,” Chase whispered, and my lips found their way to his. I rose up on my knees and drove my fingers through his hair. I pulled his head closer, echoing his whisper. Kissing him. Loving him. Heat played on the surface of my skin and the bond between us flared until I could feel it as a physical thing.

  Tomorrow, Shay would call a meeting of the Senate.

  Tomorrow, I would leave.

  Tomorrow, my emotions would go back in their box. I would strategize. I would stay strong in front of the rest of the alphas. I would win.

  But today—today wasn’t tomorrow. And for this instant, this second, I could be a girl, just kissing a boy.

  I could feel.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “RISE AND SHINE.”

  The voice that woke me the next morning was low and gruff—and male.

  A man. In my bedroom. Unannounced.

  My eyes flew open. My hand went for the knife I kept on my nightstand. Jed caught my wrist halfway there.

  “What do you feel?” he asked me.

  If he hadn’t been well over sixty, I would have shown him exactly how I felt. This was my space—mine—and my alpha instincts weren’t inclined to take any intrusion lying down. At the same time, there was another part of me that had reacted to his unexpected wake-up call—the Bryn who had grown up around werewolves, the Bryn who knew that most Weres were male, that they were bigger than humans and stronger than humans and fast enough to catch me if I ran.

  I was an alpha now, but some lessons were hard to unlearn.

  “Pissed,” I said finally, locking eyes with Jed. “I feel pissed.”

  “What else?” Jed asked, but he must have seen some hint of danger in my expression, because he dropped my wrist and took a step back.

  “More pissed?” I suggested.

  “Before you were fully awake, before you processed who I was or what I was doing here, before you remembered who you were and what you’re capable of”—Jed kept walking backward, but his voice never wavered—“what did you feel?”

  I hated that he was asking me to think about this, hated that even for a moment, even half-asleep, I’d felt …

  Fear.

  I could tell, just by looking at Jed, that he was waiting for me to say the word out loud. He’d be waiting a very long time. Even if I hadn’t been alpha, even if there hadn’t been an entire pack of people counting on me to be strong, I never would have admitted to that kind of weakness.

  Fear was something you squashed, something you pushed down and hid and glossed over, because fear was like catnip to werewolves. They could smell it. They could taste it. It whetted their appetite for more—more fear, more of you.

  In short: not good.

  When I was a kid, Callum taught me how to hide my fear. But not feeling it? That was something I taught myself.

  “You ever notice, right before you flash out, that the room gets really small?” The rhetorical question seemed harmless enough, but Jed wasn’t done yet. “Maybe you start to feel trapped. A trickle of sweat builds on the back of your neck. Your heart starts pounding faster, your mouth goes dry. What exactly would you call that, Bryn?”

  “Adrenaline,” I replied.

  Jed raised a brow.

  “Panic.” I grudgingly let go of that word, because being anxious or frantic wasn’t the same thing as being scared. You could panic that you were going to sleep through your alarm or miss your flight or get caught making out with your boyfriend on the bathroom floor.

&n
bsp; You could panic about a lot of things, and it didn’t taste like …

  “Fear.” Jed said the word. I wondered if he expected me to flinch, but I didn’t. I didn’t even blink.

  “Claustrophobia. Anxiety. Desperation,” I countered.

  Jed did not seem impressed with my vocabulary. “Fear,” he said again, uncompromising. Certain.

  Despite myself, I thought of the way I’d felt in the forest the day before, running and running and working myself into a frenzy. I’d run like something was chasing me. I’d told myself I would die if I stopped.

  But had I ever really been scared?

  Jed smiled. With the scars on his face, it looked more like a grimace, but his eyes were twinkling. “Downright ironic, isn’t it?” he asked me.

  “What?” I asked, though I had a sinking suspicion what he was going to say next.

  “It’s ironic,” Jed said again, “that if you want to be stronger, the first thing you’re going to have to learn is how to let yourself be weak.”

  Half an hour later, I was sitting in the dirt outside the cabin Jed shared with Caroline, awaiting instructions he seemed in no particular hurry to give. Oblivious to—or ignoring—my impatience, Jed took a seat on the ground beside me and reclined back on the heels of his hands.

  “My way,” he reminded me.

  “Your way,” I repeated. I wasn’t overjoyed with the prospect of more dirt sitting—or with the way he’d woken me up that morning—but I would have made a deal with the devil himself to find a way to control the power inside me, to make it something more than a defense mechanism.

  Someday, waiting for the other guy to attack might get me killed.

  “You know how to get there,” Jed said finally, breaking what felt like a small eternity of silence. “Deep down, you know. You just ain’t admitted it to yourself yet.”

  He wasn’t talking about pain or panic or running like someone was on your heels. The kind of trigger Jed was talking about was something I wanted no part of.

  Something I’d spent my entire life training myself not to do.

  “Think of the worst thing that ever happened to you,” Jed told me. “Think of a time when you were cornered and trapped and terrified.”

  Was that really what it took to summon up my Resilience, to fall into that state where nothing mattered but surviving and protecting the people I loved?

  Where I was a faster, better Bryn?

  “Every bad thing that’s ever happened to you.” Jed was implacable. “Every moment of terror, every loss, every time you had no power, and someone else had it all. One by one by one, Bryn. That’s the way.”

  I’d said I would do anything for my pack. I’d said I would do this Jed’s way. So I did.

  I started with recent memories, moments I spent all of my time trying to forget.

  The look in Lucas’s eyes—hungry and desperate and dark—when he’d challenged my right to rule. The knowledge that had flooded my body in that instant, that a Were—any Were—was physically capable of killing me dead.

  Dread built up inside of me, like bile rising in my throat, but I pressed on and thought of another heart-in-throat moment: seeing Devon lying still on the ground, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his heart. I thought of Lake missing a shot in a fateful game of pool and pretending that she wasn’t terrified that losing might mean spending the rest of her life as the property of Shay.

  In the here and now, I was sweating. I was cold. But I wasn’t done yet. Forcing my muscles to relax, I went further, deeper, the memories flashing before my eyes at rapid speed.

  I saw a man with violet eyes threatening to burn me to death in my sleep. I couldn’t fight back, couldn’t move—

  I felt myself waking up in a cabin belonging to the monster who’d killed my parents, tied to a chair and wearing a frilly white dress designed for a little, little girl. The Rabid had touched me and cooed to me and backhanded me to the floor.

  At the time, I hadn’t let myself be scared. Didn’t ever let myself be scared, but now …

  I pictured myself standing still, as the members of Callum’s pack circled up around me. I pictured Sora, long and lean, her familiar face devoid of emotion. I pictured myself just standing there, heart pounding, knowing that if I fought back, I might die.

  I remembered letting her break my ribs and bloody my lips, blacken my eyes and strip away every illusion I’d ever had that they were my family, that I was theirs.

  “No.” I opened my eyes. I wasn’t going to do this. There was no sense in opening up old wounds when Shay would be calling a meeting of the Senate later today. This wasn’t the time for me to be feeling anything that might remind the other alphas of what I was.

  Or, more to the point, of what I wasn’t.

  “Sooner or later,” Jed said, opening his own eyes, “you get to the point where you know fear the way you know a lover. You know what it smells like. What it tastes like. How it feels.”

  Listening to Jed use the words lover and taste in close proximity to each other was flat-out disturbing. His voice was dark and almost tender, and I just didn’t want to go there—on so many levels.

  “You memorize that feeling, Bryn, and you build a place for it in your mind. You keep it under lock and key, and when you need to …” Jed’s pupils pulsed, and an instant later, he was behind me, his arm wrapped around my throat, crushing my windpipe and cutting off the flow of air.

  “When you need to,” Jed repeated, “you let the dark things out.”

  He dropped his hold on me before my own power could flare up, and then he took a step backward, his palms upturned, unthreatening. I took that to mean that the lesson was over. He’d made his point. I’d felt the power come over him, an instant before he’d rushed me—stronger, faster, and more sure of his movements than he would have been without it.

  For a second, I let myself think of the way fear tasted—like sweat, like metal, like blood.

  “It might take some practice, and it might take some time, but you’ll get there, sooner or later.” Jed ran one hand over the stubble on his chin. “Then again, what do I know? I’m just an old man.”

  Yeah. And a saber-toothed tiger was just a kitty.

  “Caroline!” Jed’s scarred face lit up as he said her name. Warily, I followed his gaze over my left shoulder. Sure enough, the Wayfarer’s resident assassin was standing there, her blue eyes narrowed at Jed, like she hadn’t expected him to clue me in to the fact that she was there.

  “Going running?” Jed asked her.

  Caroline nodded, her gaze—sharp and guarded—shifting over to me.

  Jed cleared his throat. “What do you say, Bryn?” he said, suddenly sounding inept and awkward and old. “You feel like a run?”

  I stared at him, trying to decide whether or not he was seriously suggesting that the two of us play running buddies, like we’d never wished each other dead.

  “I can run by myself,” Caroline interjected. “In fact, I prefer it.” She sent Jed a mutinous look that told me he’d be hearing about this later.

  Jed, however, was not easily deterred. “It will make Ali happy,” he said, playing his trump card. “Won’t it?”

  I didn’t answer his facetious question. Instead, disgruntled, I turned to Caroline. “You’d better be able to keep up,” I told her.

  She arched one blonde eyebrow at me. “Big words, wolf girl.”

  She took off running. I took off after her, pushing down all of the memories my session with Jed had called up and banishing my gut reaction to them—the one that said if and when I let the dark things out, there was no guarantee I’d ever be able to put them back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CAROLINE AND I DIDN’T SAY TWO WORDS TO EACH other on our run, but at least she kept up. By the time we’d finished and I’d made my way home, I wanted nothing more than to fall back into bed.

  You! You! You! Not Pack, you. Want play? Want play?

  The voice in my mind didn’t belong to someone who was deliber
ately trying to talk to me, and I certainly hadn’t gone looking for anyone else’s thoughts, but the littlest members of my pack could never quite contain themselves. Their thoughts—such as they were—were always at the surface of their minds, spilling through the pack-bond whenever I was in range.

  Down. Up, down! You!

  The content of Kaitlin’s thoughts told me that she was in wolf form, playing. Or, more specifically, play fighting. I didn’t realize until I opened the front door and walked into the living that the person she was playing with was Callum. He was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Even that low to the ground, there was still a weight to his presence, a power I never would have noticed before I was an alpha myself.

  A power that my baby sister—not quite a baby any longer—gave very little heed as she bobbed up and down on her front paws, lowering her head with a loopy, lupine grin. A second after I came into the room, she pounced on Callum’s feet.

  He bobbed his own head and reached out to gently tussle her from one side to another.

  You! You play! Katie was ecstatic. Out loud, she made a sound that could only be described as a baby growl, and I felt a sudden stab of loneliness—because I was Katie’s alpha, and she was playing with Callum, because he was Callum, and there was nothing playful between the two of us now.

  Bryn? Katie whirled around, feeling my presence as safety and warmth. She came bounding over to my feet and immediately bit my sock, pulling me toward Callum.

  No, Katie, I said softly. You go. You play.

  She cocked her head to the side. Bryn play?

  Later, I told her. Bryn play later.

  Satisfied, Katie turned her attention back to Callum. In blatantly unstealthy fashion, she leapt toward him.

  Out of habit, I scanned the room for Alex. Where one of Ali’s twins went, the other followed. I found him standing in the shadows, intently watching Katie, like a bodyguard keeping an eye on a particularly troublesome client. On the other side of the pack-bond, his mind was steeped in the sensation of togetherness and love and warmth, the way I felt when the pack went for a midnight run.