Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE BLOOD WASN’T HUMAN AND IT WASN’T FRESH, but it was everywhere. The entire cabin smelled like copper and rotting meat. The floorboards—wooden and rotting themselves—had soaked up most of the actual liquid, but there was splatter on every wall in the house.

  “You,” Archer said, coming in on my heels and appraising the “decorations,” “live a very strange life.”

  I couldn’t exactly argue the point. Chase and Lake were waiting out in the forest. This much blood—even if it was animal blood, even if it was old—might have been too much for the predators inside them, and that wasn’t a chance any of us could afford to take, so that left Jed, Caroline, and me to appraise the inside of the cabin—with Archer tagging along.

  “What happened here?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question. The pattern of gore made it look like something had been eviscerated.

  Maybe multiple somethings.

  “There aren’t any bodies.” Even Caroline sounded disturbed, and that couldn’t possibly have been a good thing. “There’s nothing but blood.”

  As we walked from room to room, I noted the way Archer kept his distance from Caroline, and the way that Jed never took his eyes off Archer.

  Four psychics walk into a rotting cabin.…

  I didn’t let myself finish the joke. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened here. Someone had been living in this cabin—most likely Maddy. How long ago had she left? What had she done while she was here? Was she the one who’d painted these walls red with blood?

  In the corner of the back bedroom, I spotted a bundle of blankets. As I knelt down to investigate, I saw a small brown tuft of fur. For a split second, I froze, but after ascertaining that the tuft wasn’t moving, I nudged it with the tip of my shoe, revealing the rest.

  A teddy bear.

  It was old, worn, and missing both eyes, and I was fairly certain someone had made a regular habit of gnawing on its ear.

  “Who lives here?” Archer asked.

  I picked up the teddy bear, running my thumb over the edge of its worn fur and wondering if it had belonged to one of my kids.

  “No one lives here,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  I grabbed the blankets, too, and headed back out to the woods. I’d seen enough. Remembered enough.

  This place had been steeped in blood long before someone had taken to slaughtering animals here. Wilson had seen to that, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time than I had to imagining what life would have been like for the kids in my pack, growing up under a psychopath’s thumb.

  The last thing I wanted to think about was Maddy coming here, because she couldn’t come home.

  Wordlessly, Chase took the blankets from me. Lake took the teddy bear. Without my even having to ask, they lifted their respective targets to their faces and inhaled. My mind was flooded with their impressions.

  Running water. Fresh-cut grass. Maddy.

  She didn’t smell like us anymore, but she didn’t smell like a killer, either. If anything, she smelled a little bit like—

  “Shampoo,” Lake declared out loud. “Drugstore shampoo—the cheap kind. Smells like she used the whole bottle.”

  “How long ago was she here?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

  Lake looked at Chase.

  “It’s hard to be sure,” Chase said. “She slept on these blankets every night, so her scent would be strong, regardless.”

  I digested that piece of information. There was no shortage of beds and cots in Wilson’s cabin, but Maddy—who’d come back here for reasons I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around—had slept on the floor.

  “Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?” Caroline was all business.

  “Months,” Chase said, looking up from the blankets. “I’d say she left three, maybe four months ago.”

  That left three months unaccounted for after Maddy had left the Wayfarer, and at least as much time between when she left here and the Wyoming murder. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d hunted in the woods, but couldn’t figure out why she would have gone to the trouble of killing so many animals in the house. Why had she come here in the first place? Why had she left?

  “Did she sleep with this, too?” I turned back to the battered teddy, the one that had probably once belonged to Lily or Sophie or one of the younger kids.

  Lake nodded, and I wondered if she could picture Maddy the way I could, curled up on a blanket, holding on to the only piece of the pack she had left.

  My heart hurt.

  The day was almost over, and Callum had told me we’d have at most a week. We weren’t any closer to finding Maddy than we had been when we left, and the state of Wilson’s cabin didn’t do much to assuage my doubts about Maddy’s mental state.

  Time to bring out the big gun.

  “Here,” I said, taking the teddy bear from Lake and handing it to Archer. “You said you needed something that belonged to Maddy. It’s not clothing or hair, but hopefully, it’ll do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NIGHTFALL—AND SLEEP—COULDN’T COME FAST enough. We set up camp again, on our side of the border, but Archer opted for sleeping in his car—either because he didn’t like people watching him work, or because the idea of sleeping in close proximity to two werewolves, a girl he’d tried to kill, and a girl he’d been conditioned to think of only as a killer probably fell under the classification of “let’s not and say we did.” Or maybe a little of both.

  Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I’d seen the past few days—every horror, every drop of blood—and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.

  And then I practiced letting it out.

  This time, I didn’t start with a specific memory. I didn’t walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head—a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.

  In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I’d been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there—in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.

  In a way, I’d been building rooms just like this one in my mind my entire life—for fear and sadness and everything I couldn’t let myself want. But this time, it was different, because even though there were no windows or doors, no way out—there was a way in.

  I just pictured myself there, surrounded on all sides until I could taste it, smell it, feel it in my pounding pulse. Fear. It was endless, infinite and overwhelming.

  Copper on the tip of my tongue.

  Chills on my skin.

  A breath caught like sandpaper in my throat.

  Can’t stay here, I thought desperately. Can’t. It’s too much, it’s all too much. Have to—

  Escape. That wasn’t a thought. It was a feeling, familiar, but ancient.

  Escape. Escape. Escape.

  My eyelids fluttered.

  Survive.

  “Bryn?”

  Archer made the mistake of placing a hand on my shoulder, and suddenly, it was like I was watching myself from outside my body. The world around me settled into slow motion, silence—

  And the next thing I knew, he was down.

  Realizing, on some level, that Archer wasn’t actually a threat, I jerked myself out of the room I’d built for my fears, slamming an extra set of mental walls up all around it.

  Safe. The feeling—the instinct—the adrenaline subsided.

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said. Coming from someone I’d just tossed through the air like I was training for the shot put, that was the last thing I’d expected to hear.

  “Sorry for what?”

  Archer tilted his head forward and rolled his eyes up to meet mine, his brows slightly arched. “Not entirely sure what the right answer is here, so I’m going to hedge my bets and go with everything.”

  His tone was sardoni
c enough that I wasn’t sure whether he meant the words or not. If Devon had been there, he probably would have started crooning apology songs, just to break the tension.

  “Well, I’m sorry—for kicking your butt,” I said finally.

  He snorted.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked, then amended my question. “Maddy.” I made myself say her name. “Did you talk to her?”

  Archer shook his head. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She ran.”

  I was fairly certain that when Archer had entered my dreams, I hadn’t been able to run. He’d been able to freeze me in place, or beckon me forward.

  “I could force her,” Archer said lightly. “I don’t want to.”

  My first instinct was to tell him to do it anyway, but the part of me that was still human couldn’t form the words.

  Archer saved me the trouble. “I’m hoping that if you come with me, I might not have to get rough.”

  “Come with you?” I asked. I hadn’t known that kind of thing was even possible. “How am I supposed to come with you?”

  He shrugged. “I enter your dream. I enter hers. We hope I can splice the two together, and voilà.”

  That seemed like the kind of thing he should have mentioned in the first place. He must have seen the irritation on my face, because a matching expression flickered across his features, and I remembered that, technically, he was the one doing me the favor.

  “Do you need a piece of my clothing?” I asked, deciding this wasn’t worth arguing over.

  Archer gave me a look. “You’re right here,” he said slowly, as if I were very dull. “Why would I need your clothes?”

  Well, excuse me for not knowing exactly how his knack worked—I was just learning the ins and outs of my own.

  “You sleep,” Archer said, in a voice that reminded me he could be a dangerous person. “I’ll do the rest.”

  I might have balked at the idea of letting him inside my head again, but he was still holding that ratty old teddy bear that smelled like Maddy and had probably belonged to one of the younger kids, once upon a time.

  It’s hard to hold anything against a guy with a teddy.

  “Okay.” I didn’t say any more than that. I just made my way back inside the tent and lay down, ignoring the open-eyed Caroline sleeping six inches away.

  I closed my eyes, I opened my mind, and I slept.

  My dream started off the way my dreams always seemed to these days—in the forest. I didn’t remember, at first, that this wasn’t real, but then I came to an opening at the edge of the woods and saw a cartoon mouse the size of a man. He was wearing overalls and sitting on a motorcycle, and although that didn’t strike me as particularly unlikely or strange, I began to get that nagging feeling that said, “Something isn’t right.”

  “Bryn.” A voice called my name softly. The moment I saw Archer, I remembered—why we were here, what he was trying to do.

  “Maddy?” I asked.

  He reached out to take my hand. I didn’t hesitate as I slipped my fingers into his. He caught sight of the mouse on the motorcycle and shook his head.

  “I’m not even going to ask.”

  The scene around us changed slowly. The sky overhead went from night to day. The leaves on the trees thinned to needles; the grass underfoot turned a bright, spring-sheen green.

  And then I saw her.

  Maddy.

  I wasn’t sure whether I thought her name, or said it out loud. Either way, she heard me.

  She ran.

  I ran after her, and for the first time in days, I wasn’t scared of her, of what we would find. I just wanted to be there, to see her, to put my arms around her and know that she was real.

  Or at least, as real as anything in a dream could be.

  “Maddy, wait!” This time, I called after her out loud, and she turned to glance at me, just for a second.

  Something isn’t right.

  I didn’t know what it was, so I kept running—through forest after forest, with changing scenery, changing leaves. Abruptly, Maddy stopped running. I stopped running, too. I walked toward her, weightless and light on my toes. Her brown hair was straight and neat, not a strand out of place. Her clothes were dirty and torn, but there was grace to Maddy’s stance, the tilt of her head.

  I reached out to touch her shoulder, and my hand passed right through.

  “It’s my fault,” Maddy said, without turning around. “Everywhere I go, it never stops.” She turned her head to the side, until I could see her profile in the shadows. “You shouldn’t touch me.”

  I couldn’t touch her. Whether that was the work of her subconscious or mine, I wasn’t sure.

  “Everything I touch dies,” Maddy said, the words quiet, but distinct.

  Suddenly, the two of us weren’t in the forest anymore. We were in a cabin. Samuel Wilson’s cabin, in Alpine Creek.

  There was blood everywhere—fresh blood.

  “I didn’t do it,” Maddy said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Maddy.” I tried to touch her arm again and failed. “Where are you?”

  She didn’t answer, but a jolt of images crossed from her mind to mine: sharp stone, dark walls, a little river.

  A tiny slat of light.

  “Maddy, look at me.”

  She looked at me, and I was struck by the fact that she didn’t look different. She looked like Maddy, our Maddy, not the specter from my dream that night before.

  She didn’t look like a killer.

  “The Senate knows about Wyoming.”

  She weathered those words like a blow.

  “Callum’s stalling them, but if I can’t find you, if something happens again—”

  I couldn’t put what had been done in that house in Wyoming into words. I couldn’t even think the word monster.

  “The other alphas will come for you. First come, first serve. I need to find you, Maddy. You need to let me help you.”

  “Help me?” Maddy said, and this time, she didn’t sound like herself, not at all. “You can’t help me, Bryn. The only person who can help me is dead.”

  Lucas.

  She was talking about Lucas.

  “You don’t know,” Maddy said. “You just don’t know.”

  She didn’t cry, but the intensity in her voice made me want to. A physical change came over her body—the way she stood, the arch to her back, the lines of her threadbare clothes.

  “You just don’t know,” she said again.

  I touched her arm, really touched it this time, and she turned all the way around to face me. I watched as she brought her right hand to rest on her stomach.

  Her very pregnant stomach.

  And then I woke up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I HAD NO IDEA IF ARCHER HAD SEEN WHAT I’D SEEN, but as soon as he opened his eyes, I was right there in his face.

  “Tell me that was just a dream,” I said.

  You don’t know. Maddy’s voice echoed in my head. You just don’t know.

  The only person who can help me is dead.

  “The life-size mouse was a dream,” Archer said, his tone almost comically serious. “The forest, the cabin, the way she looked when you first saw her—that was all a dream.”

  But her stomach …

  “It wasn’t a dream, Bryn.” Archer’s voice was very soft, very gentle. “I knew there was something when I went into her dreams on my own. I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but—”

  “Maddy’s pregnant.” My voice was even softer than Archer’s. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t wait for him to. I just walked away—away from Archer, away from our camp, away from everyone and everything.

  Maddy had left the Wayfarer in December, two weeks after Lucas had died. She’d been holding it together by a string, and she’d said she was leaving because she couldn’t get better with me in her head.

  She’d said that she needed to be somewhere that I wasn’t.

  Now, seven months later, she was pregnant—and judging by the s
ize of her stomach, pretty far along.

  The only person who can help me is dead.

  I’d known objectively that Maddy had loved Lucas. I’d known that the time I’d spent fighting Valerie’s coven, she’d spent with him. But I hadn’t realized—

  I’d never even thought—

  She was pregnant when she left. I couldn’t hide from that realization, couldn’t deny it. And that means Lucas is the father.

  Just like that, I was right there again, in the woods outside the Wayfarer, kneeling next to him, running my hand over the fur on his neck, telling him to go to sleep.

  To die.

  And now Maddy was out there broken and alone and pregnant. A wave of nausea crashed into my body, and I bent over at the waist, afraid that I might actually throw up.

  The Senate didn’t know. Shay didn’t know. Because if they had, if they’d known that not only was there a female up for grabs, but also a baby, not even Callum could have kept them away.

  There was nothing more important to Weres than children. Nothing. The idea that I’d let a pregnant teenager carrying a werewolf pup go off into the big, bad world alone would have seemed more monstrous to the other alphas than the Wyoming murder.

  Was that why Maddy went Rabid? I wondered. Werewolves were wired for pack living. Lone wolves were under enough strain going it alone in normal circumstances, but werewolf pregnancies were notoriously difficult, notoriously painful. Most human women didn’t survive, but even for female Weres, it was far from a walk in the park.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone should have to go through alone.

  With sudden clarity, I saw Maddy’s life stretched out before me, from the day she’d been Changed until now.

  Viciously attacked by a Rabid, her human life torn away.

  Forced to live under the thumb of the monster who’d done that to her—a sadist just as psychopathic in human form as he was as a wolf.

  Then, finally, she’d gotten a break. Finally, things had gotten better. She’d had friends, a family. She’d been safe. She’d met a boy and fallen in love.