Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  She swore under her breath. Victory—but only a small one.

  “I’m going with you.”

  Now it was my turn to glare at her. “What about Katie and Alex?” I asked. “You really want to leave them here alone?”

  That was playing dirty, but I didn’t care. Callum had said that things were going to get bloody, and there was a wolf out there hunting humans. I’d already lost one mother to a rabid werewolf. I wasn’t going to lose Ali, too.

  “Perhaps I can be of some assistance.” Jed stepped into the room. I wondered how long he’d been listening.

  Five minutes, Lake and Dev said at the exact same time.

  “I’ll go with them.” Jed cut straight to the chase.

  “You’ll what?” Ali turned her mom glare from me to Jed.

  “You don’t want to send the kids off by themselves, but you’re needed here.” Jed leaned back against the wall, not coming any closer, as if he sensed he’d walked in on something so private, it was almost sacrosanct.

  “I’ve got experience with killers, and Caroline is the best tracker I’ve ever met. If anyone asks, I’ll say they’re all my grandkids and we’re on summer vacation. People can’t get too suspicious of four kids and an old man.”

  Caroline? Jed wanted us to take Caroline—who had been raised to kill werewolves—along on our hunt for the one Rabid we might not want to kill?

  Didn’t that sound like a fundamentally bad idea to anyone else?

  Ali narrowed her eyes at Jed. “I don’t like that Bryn has to do this, and I don’t want to drag Caroline into it.”

  “Sitting here, doing nothing day after day, isn’t any better for her. Caroline needs this, and you need me.” Jed smiled, and for a second, I thought Ali might hit him. “If push comes to shove, I’ve got some contacts in law enforcement who might be able to get us out of a jam.”

  Ali’s jaw twitched, but after a long moment, she nodded. “Fine,” she said, “but you call me every night. Every single night.”

  It took me a second to realize that last statement was aimed at me.

  “I’ll call,” I promised, and an instant later, she was beside me, hugging me so tightly, I couldn’t breathe.

  “If anything happens to you,” Ali said, burying her face in my hair, “I’m never letting you out of the house again.”

  For a few seconds, I just let her hold me. I held on to her for dear life.

  Then I straightened and pushed my hair roughly out of my eyes in a gesture I’d picked up from her. “You don’t need to worry about me, Ali.”

  I might as well have been telling the wind not to blow. As I glanced around the table at the others, I was suddenly overcome with a horrible sense of premonition, one that told me that everything was changing, and that once we found Maddy, things might never be the same.

  I’m sorry, Callum had told me.

  You need to be human for this, he’d said.

  But it was his other words that haunted me, as I looked from Ali to Devon to Lake to Chase.

  Every future I can find is coated in blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THAT NIGHT, I COULDN’T SLEEP. WITH ALI IN MOM ON the Rampage mode, I couldn’t risk letting Chase sneak in the window, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw bodies.

  My parents.

  The crime scene photos.

  Lucas.

  Fighting it, I listened for the sound of the twins sleeping in the next room, and through the pack-bond, I felt the two of them snuggled up together like pups in a litter. No matter how many times Ali put them to sleep in separate beds, they always ended up in one. Needing to see them, I crept out of my room and into theirs.

  Kaitlin’s foot was resting lightly on Alex’s cheek. His rump was up in the air. When one of them moved, they both moved. They were dreaming the same dream, colors and sounds and running.

  Ali’s babies were safe and warm and happy, and I wanted desperately to believe they could stay that way forever, that Katie would never have to deal with the certainty Lake had lived with all her life, that she would never know what it was like to be looked at as a possession, a prize.

  I wanted to believe that I would get to see them grow up. I wanted for their lives to be absolutely nothing like mine.

  Giving in to the desire to be close to them, I climbed into their bed. Katie—in human form—yipped in her sleep, but didn’t wake up. Alex snuggled in close to my right side. I let their thoughts override mine. I let their senses override mine.

  I dreamed their dreams, and I slept.

  I woke with the dawn to find two little faces curiously watching mine. Katie was sitting on my stomach. Alex was perched to one side.

  “Whatcha doing?” Katie asked.

  “Sleeping,” I replied, closing my eyes.

  Alex poked me in the side of my face with a damp and chubby hand. I half-expected him to say something, but no words accompanied the poke.

  “You go ’way?” Katie asked, wriggling to get comfortable and elbowing me directly in the kidneys. “Mama’s sad.”

  I gave up trying to sleep and opened my eyes.

  “Big sister has to go away for a little while,” I said. “You two have to take good care of Mama while I’m gone. Okay?”

  Alex nodded solemnly. Katie screwed up her face until her little baby forehead was as wrinkled as a shar-pei. “Why?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was asking why I was leaving or why I wanted her to go easy on Ali while I was gone. Given that why was my sister’s favorite question, it was probably both. I took the easy way out and didn’t answer. Instead, I blew a stream of breath out onto her face, and she huffed back.

  I was her alpha, and she was my girl.

  Peeling myself out of bed, I managed to detach the little barnacles from my side. They ran ahead of me into the kitchen, where Ali was already making breakfast.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I sat.

  She placed a plate of food in front of me.

  “Eat.”

  Ali couldn’t protect me. She couldn’t keep me here or give me the life she wanted for me, but she could feed me.

  Wisely, I ate.

  “You slept in the twins’ room last night?” Asking questions she already knew the answers to was Ali’s way of demonstrably not prying.

  Yeah, right.

  “I had a lot on my mind. They keep things simple.”

  As if to corroborate my statement, Katie knocked over her glass of milk and started screaming like an irate banshee.

  Without missing a beat, Ali flipped into triage mode, sopping up the milk and distracting Katie from her tantrum. “It’s not your fault.”

  At first, I thought she was talking to Katie, but then I realized the comment was aimed at me.

  “I know you, Bryn. I know what you’re thinking, but what happened with Maddy wasn’t your fault.”

  Ali and I had never talked about Maddy’s leaving. We’d never openly acknowledged what Lucas had done, or the way I’d been forced to fight back.

  “I killed him,” I said, staring down at my plate. “I killed him, knowing what it would do to her.”

  For a long time, Ali didn’t say anything. I wanted her to tell me that I hadn’t had a choice, that if I’d let a challenge go unanswered, I would have been opening the pack up to more, but after all these years’ of living among werewolves, Ali still didn’t think like one.

  She wasn’t thinking about the pack.

  “You killed Lucas.” Ali didn’t sugarcoat it. She didn’t hedge. “Just like I killed my mother before she could kill you.” The weight of the things we’d done hung in the air between us. “It happened, it’s done, and I’m not sorry that either one of us is alive. You can regret a lot of things, Bryn, but don’t you ever feel sorry for that.”

  “Never,” Katie chirped, like this was all a game—because at her age, everything was. “Never ever ever ever!”

  So much for crying over spilled milk.

  “Everybody decent?” Lake ye
lled those words from the front porch, and that was the only warning we got before she let herself in.

  “Morning, Lake.” Ali gestured toward the kitchen table, but Lake shook her head.

  “I already ate. Twice. I just stopped by because I was packing and I thought I’d see if there was anything Bryn wanted me to bring.”

  When most girls said the word packing, they meant clothes. When Lake said packing, she meant heat.

  “Fix me up with one of everything,” I told her. “And make it silver.”

  Lake nodded. At any other time, weapons talk would have made her downright giddy, but this wasn’t just any Rabid we were hunting.

  There was a chance—maybe even a good one—that this was a friend.

  “We’ll need restraints,” I said, thinking out loud. “And something to knock her out with if she’s …”

  If she’s out of control?

  If she’s a monster?

  If she’s insane?

  Across the table, Alex peered curiously up at me.

  “If she’s sleepy,” I said.

  Lake glanced at the twins and nodded. “If she’s sleepy,” she repeated, “I reckon a Taser or two might help her nap.”

  Neither Katie nor Alex wanted anything to do with a conversation about naps. Ali set Katie back down, and the twins began babbling to each other, in words I couldn’t make out or understand. They had their own language, their own gestures, their own little twin world that, even as their alpha, I could never truly enter. The older they got, the more intense that connection was. If I reached out for her mind, I felt his. If I reached out for his, I felt hers.

  Beside me, Lake paused in the middle of a sentence in which she was referring to a tranq gun as a pillow. She trailed off, her gaze caught on the twins. Alex reached out and grabbed Katie’s fist.

  Griffin.

  I didn’t go looking for the thought through the bond, and Lake didn’t send it to me, but in that moment, she was thinking her brother’s name so intensely that I couldn’t help overhearing.

  Natural-born females, like Katie and Lake, were so rare because a cruel genetic quirk ensured that female werewolf pups were only carried to term if they were half of a set of twins. It had never occurred to me before that seeing Katie and Alex like this might be hard for Lake, whose own twin had died when we were only a few years older than my siblings were now.

  I could barely remember the way Griffin looked and was suddenly struck by the realization that Lake would never forget. That what Katie and Alex had now was something Lake and Griffin had once. Something they wouldn’t ever have again. I reached out for Lake’s mind and felt the ache, the emptiness, the space inside of her where her brother should have been.

  How could I have missed this? She might as well have been missing a limb, and I’d never seen it, never noticed.

  Stay out of my head, Bryn. Lake’s voice was shaky in my mind, but I retreated, giving her space.

  “So,” I said, “about those pillows …”

  After a few more minutes of thinly veiled conversation, Lake went off to see about the weapons—and to get away from me. I hadn’t meant to go nosing around in her head.

  Just like I hadn’t meant to send Maddy out into the big bad world to deal with a black hole of emotion alone.

  Not wanting to prod Ali into another pep talk, I stood up from the table, restless and aching with everything I couldn’t afford to let myself feel.

  “We need to leave within the hour,” I told Ali. “I’m going to check on Chase and Jed.”

  That much, I should be able to handle.

  That much, I could do.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “SIT DOWN.”

  Checking on Jed wasn’t exactly going as planned. He was already up when I got there, already packed, and waiting for me when I showed up at the cabin he and Caroline shared. The Deadliest Little Psychic was nowhere to be seen, and Jed seemed to be under the impression that now was as good a time as any for lesson two.

  “Jed, I don’t think—”

  He didn’t let me finish that sentence. “Once upon a time, that might have been true, but I’d say that these days you’re doing plenty of thinking. Not thinking doesn’t keep a person up at night.”

  Jed’s observation was mild, but it made me wonder just how tired I looked.

  “Are you actually accusing me of thinking too much?” I raised one eyebrow in an imitation of an expression I’d seen on Devon’s face one too many times. “Have you met me?”

  I’d been guilty of a lot of things in my life, but an overabundance of caution or logic had never been one of them. You didn’t end up accidentally founding your own werewolf pack by thinking things through or making pro and con lists.

  “I’m not going to pretend to know what it’s like in your shoes, Bryn. You’ve got a lot on your mind, probably always will.” Jed eased himself down on the ground next to me. “But if you want to control what you are and what you can do, you’re going to have to learn when to think and when to give in and feel.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that this would have been infinitely easier a year ago, or two, or three, back when I’d been nothing but feelings. Look Before You Leap Bryn could have mastered her Resilience in a heartbeat.

  But I wasn’t that girl anymore.

  “Close your eyes. Breathe. And remember.”

  This time, Jed didn’t have to tell me what to remember. I knew what he wanted me to do. Ultimately, the thing that prodded me into doing it wasn’t that Callum had implied he wouldn’t Change me until I’d learned. It was the realization that Maddy had survival instincts every bit as honed as I did.

  She was Resilient, too.

  If the worst turned out to be true and we couldn’t get through to her, if she was caught up in a red haze of her own, too shattered on the inside to do anything but hurt, I’d need every advantage I could get just to keep the two of us alive.

  So I forced myself to think of the look on Maddy’s face—broken, but regal and holding it together by a string—the day she’d left.

  I’m going to go away, and I’m going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.

  Those were words Maddy had actually said to me. For once, I didn’t fight the memories. I didn’t fight back the darkness, the horror, the fear that she’d been closer to the edge than I’d realized.

  You did this to me. You.

  Now my mind was putting words in her mouth, things she’d never said.

  You killed him. You left me to deal with it alone.

  I heard the words in Maddy’s voice. I allowed my imagination to conjure up the nightmares I hadn’t let myself dream the night before. I saw Maddy, covered in blood. I saw her Shifting to wolf form.

  I saw Lucas—hopeless, hungry, and full of fury—leaping for my throat.

  Blood, blood, everywhere there was blood.

  Just like that, I was back under the sink at my parents’ house, hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. Except this time, when I peeked out and saw the Rabid tearing through my father’s skin and shredding it like a manic child opening a present, the Rabid wasn’t the one from my memories, the one who’d haunted my dreams.

  It was Maddy.

  You did this to me.

  The fear was overwhelming and absolute. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to be feeling it. I didn’t want the world to be closing in around me as I watched blood splatter up against off-white walls.

  All of a sudden, I was standing, yards away from where I’d been before. My back was to the wall of Jed’s cabin, and I could feel my pulse throbbing in my stomach.

  “Feel it?” Jed asked, over the sound of my breathing, the deafening beating of my heart.

  I could feel the surge of energy, that whisper deep inside of me, the kind of power that let a panicked mother lift a car.

  “Hold on to it.”

  My body was quickly realizing that there was no present danger. I could feel the pow
er beginning to leak out of my limbs, but I pulled it back.

  The smell of wet cardboard and rotting flesh. The heavy sound of breathing in the silence.

  I lived and breathed the fear, and my senses heightened. I felt something—an odd kind of silence, not quite a noise—behind me. Hopped up on power, I whirled, and a second later, I slammed Caroline back against the exterior wall of the cabin, my hand around her neck.

  I hadn’t heard her coming, but I’d known she was there. After a moment, I let go of my Resilience, allowed it to slip away. I pried my hand away from Caroline’s throat.

  Unfathomably, she smiled. “I take it the lesson went well?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TWO PSYCHICS, TWO WEREWOLVES, AND A PSYCHIC human alpha walk up to a crime scene.…

  It was like the beginning of a very bad joke, and I found myself wishing that Devon were there to share it with. Instead, our merry little band—Lake, Chase, Jed, Caroline, and me—stood in absolute silence, the wind cutting through the trees with a high-pitched whistle and carrying new scents to the Weres’ noses.

  “There’s no one around for miles,” Lake told us. “That it?”

  She jerked her head toward a house in the distance, and I nodded, even though there was nothing about the way the house looked—from the outside, in the dark—that would have tipped off the average observer to the fact that days earlier, someone had been murdered there.

  Unconsciously, I began running through everything we knew about the circumstances in which the death had been discovered.

  The front door was closed when the police responded to a 911 call placed from the vicinity. They found the body—what was left of it—inside. The walls were dripping blood.

  I forced myself to focus on the sights and sounds of the here and now. We were close enough to the mountains that even in the dead of summer, it smelled like snow, and the moon overhead was a shade fuller than it had been the night before.

  To my eyes, the world was shadowy and dark, quiet, still. I could barely make out the outlines of the people standing right next to me, but to the Weres, the scant moonlight would have been as good as a spotlight, illuminating the leaves on the trees, each blade of grass, and the house in the distance.