Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Come up with a plan.

  After another long moment, I pushed Lake back, and even though I could never have broken her grip of my own accord, she let loose of me immediately. The two of us sat up, and I surveyed her, comparing her appearance and mine out of habit. I was wearing jeans, a sweater, and boots. Lake was barefoot and the only reason she was wearing even a tank top and boy shorts was that she’d outgrown streaking when she was about seven.

  Except for that one time the summer when we were twelve, but that was completely beside the point.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked her.

  Lake grinned. “Nope.”

  On the heels of the coldest spring we’d had in years, Lake was sun-kissed and tanned, color in her cheeks, highlights in her hair. I couldn’t imagine her ever letting someone else beat her, no matter the cause.

  As if she sensed where my thoughts were going, Lake set about distracting me. “How much you wanna bet I can put a bullet through that guy’s Coke?” She gestured back toward the Wayfarer, and I noticed that a new group of people had taken a seat in one of the booths. From this distance, I could barely make them out through the dusty window, but I didn’t doubt for a second that Lake’s view of them was much clearer.

  “No deal,” I told Lake. I’d learned not to bet with her—about anything—by the time we were eight.

  Except for that one time the summer when we were twelve, but again—completely beside the point.

  “Besides,” I said, “Matilda’s over by the fence.” I’d never actually met Lake’s favorite shotgun, but I’d heard enough stories to make an educated guess.

  “She’s fickle, is Matilda,” Lake admitted. “But boy, can the old girl get the job done.”

  “What’d this guy do anyway?”

  As a general rule, Lake didn’t shoot people without a reason—or some assurance that they would heal almost as soon as she shot them.

  “Jerk cheated on his girlfriend,” Lake replied. “And stiffed me on my tip the last time through.”

  Lake had been waiting tables at the Wayfarer since she was about twelve. Anyone who’d been to the restaurant more than once knew that you didn’t play pool with Mitch’s daughter expecting to win and you didn’t skimp on her tip. I’d never been here before, and even I knew that. I also knew that if you had a secret, you didn’t come to the Wayfarer in the first place. There were no secrets with Lake Mitchell. None.

  “So you asked for permissions, broke the conditions, and Callum had you beaten, huh?”

  My first instinct was to pull back, but before my upper lip had worked itself even halfway into a good snarl, I let it go, the tension melting off my face. Lake was Lake. She couldn’t help asking. It probably would have sucked more if she hadn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that if and when I said a word about any of this to anyone, it would be on my terms, not theirs.

  The next time Callum’s name crossed my lips, it would be because I wanted to say it, not because someone had asked.

  Measuring my response, Lake plucked a strand of grass from the ground and chewed on it, deceptively insightful. “Don’t want to talk about it?” she guessed, nonchalant.

  Did I want to talk about the fact that I’d disobeyed the pack? That Callum had betrayed me, over and over again; that every day, he’d let me go on believing one thing when reality was another? Did I want to talk about the fact that together, Callum and I had destroyed Ali’s marriage, torn my family apart, and brought life to a screeching halt?

  “Not particularly.”

  “You want to race me to the dock?” Lake asked in the same casual tone.

  I thought about running with the pack—how connected I’d felt. How invincible.

  “Ten-second head start?” It helped to barter with Lake.

  “Five.”

  I took off the moment the word was out of her mouth, ignoring the pain in my side and the way the bruises on my face and shoulders throbbed as my movements pulled skin tight across muscle.

  I was fine.

  Lake tore past me in a blur, never one to hold back on super-speed just because her opponent didn’t have it. Jaw set, teeth clenched, I pushed myself to keep up, keep her in sight, and in the edges of my mind, I felt him.

  Chase.

  He and his wolf wanted to be here. They wanted to run with me, and as I pushed myself harder and harder, I pretended that Chase was there beside me, his hand looped through mine. In my dream, I’d kept watch over him. Protected him. I’d been the strong one.

  I hadn’t been the one crumpled on the ground.

  With the Wayfarer behind me, I ran, trying to leave everything but that memory in my dust. My feet beat into the ground again and again, punishing it and punishing my body for its human weakness.

  If what I’d seen the night before was real—and every instinct I had said it was—then a Rabid was still stalking Chase’s dreams. The same Rabid that had hunted him down as human prey. The Rabid.

  It didn’t matter if my ribs hurt. It didn’t matter if every time I blinked, I saw Sora’s fist coming toward my face. I needed a plan. I needed to be strong. So I just kept running, because come hell or high water, a girl couldn’t afford to be weak or human at a time like this.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO THE DOCK, LAKE WAS ALREADY lounging, her head thrown back and her feet dangling just above the surface of her namesake. The way I saw it, I had two choices: deal her in, or lie to her face. Experience—and my acquaintance with her trigger finger—told me that she made a better ally than an enemy, and if there were some things that were mine and mine alone, to play and replay in my head as I stared at my ceiling each night, there were others that I needed a second opinion on. And if that second opinion happened to come from a waitress with no compunctions whatsoever about eavesdropping on any and all Weres who passed through her territory, all the better.

  “You heard anything about the new wolf?” I asked, plopping down next to her on the dock. Even with my ribs protesting so much that I wondered if they’d poked a hole in my lungs, the question made its way easily off my tongue. Things were always easy with Lake and me, even though Mr. Mitchell always swore that “doing things the hard way” was her middle name, the same way “pack business” could have been mine.

  “I heard my dad talking to Ali on the phone,” Lake said, staring out at the water. “Mama Bear was spitting nails—something about you and this new boy.”

  “Chase.” Supplying his name didn’t make me lose track of reality, but when I blinked, I kept my eyes closed for a fraction of a second longer than I would have otherwise, waiting for Chase or his wolf to appear, emblazoned on the inside of my eyelids. Now that I wasn’t running anymore, it was harder to picture him, harder to feel him on the other side of the bond I’d forged.

  “Ali didn’t say the boy’s name,” Lake continued, closing her own eyes and tilting her head back, offering her face up to the sun. “She just said that he was bad news—for you. That Callum was hiding something. That you’d end up hurt.”

  At first, I’d assumed that the conversation Lake had overheard was the one that had directly prefaced Ali dragging me and the twins off to the Wayfarer, but her words made me ask for a clarification on that point, and it became apparent that Ali had been in contact with Mitch long before I’d broken the conditions of my permissions.

  Ali’s lack of confidence in my ability to stay out of trouble was astounding. Or it would have been, if I’d proven her even the tiniest bit wrong.

  “Did Ali or your dad know that the Rabid who attacked Chase was the one who killed my family?” I was fairly certain I knew the answer to that question, but I had to ask. A week ago, I would have sworn that Callum couldn’t have kept something like that from me, either.

  To my relief, the second the word Rabid left my mouth, Lake’s eyes flew open, and she almost fell off the end of the dock, supernatural grace and balance the only things that saved her from taking a nosedive I wouldn’t have been able to a
void.

  “The Rabid who killed your … I thought Callum killed that scum-licking, dirt-sucking, mother—”

  Sensing that Lake could provide an infinite number of adjectives to describe the man Chase called Prancer, I cut her off. “I thought so, too, but no. The Rabid got away. Nobody thought it crucial to tell me. Flash-forward eleven years, and what do you know, Chase gets bit.”

  Lake digested that for a moment. “And I’m guessing the alpha didn’t particularly want you to figure that one out.”

  I was grateful that she hadn’t said Callum’s name this time. “He let me see Chase, knowing I’d figure it out, and then he had me beaten for doing it.”

  Ali’s logic had crept into my thoughts enough that my mouth was verbalizing it to Lake. If I could run with broken ribs, I could force myself to part with one or two ugly truths and to silently say the words that cut me most.

  Callum. Pack. Stone River. Permissions.

  I thought the words and thought them hard, pushing through it like the pain was nothing.

  Callum.

  Pack.

  Stone River.

  Callum.

  Under the waistband of my jeans, the Mark was still there. I placed my hand over it, lining my fingers up with the grooves that Callum had carved into my skin.

  “The Rabid is still alive. He’s been alive all this time, and now, he’s messing with my—” The possessive seemed more important than the noun that followed it. I wasn’t sure what to call Chase—my friend? My wolf? My other self?

  “So it’s true,” Lake said, saving me the trouble of finishing my sentence.

  “What’s true?”

  “You and this boy. You Marked him.”

  When she put it like that, the impossibility of the situation became a magnitude more difficult to ignore. I wasn’t a werewolf, and I certainly wasn’t the Stone River Pack alpha. Callum hadn’t been present when I’d thrown my pack-bond at Chase. The alpha hadn’t forged a new connection between us, I hadn’t bitten Chase, he hadn’t bitten me, and what we shared was nothing like the bond between a werewolf and his mate.

  It also bore no resemblance to the bond between Callum and me.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was—” How could I possibly describe what had happened, even to Lake? “We’d just figured out that his Rabid was the same as mine, and they were going to separate us.”

  We’d panicked. Both of us. “I had to calm him down. I couldn’t let them take him away. I had to—”

  Had to what? I wasn’t explaining this right. Lake was sitting very still, an odd light in her eyes that I couldn’t quite diagnose.

  “I had to protect him. And me. So I took everything I felt for the pack. I saw the bond, and instead of closing myself off to it, I pulled. I pulled at it and I thrust it toward Chase.”

  I expected Lake to tell me again that what I’d done was impossible, but instead, she looked down at her knees, and in the softest voice I’d ever heard her use, she asked me the last question I ever expected to hear from her lips. “Could you do it again?”

  For a second, I thought she was asking if, given the chance, I would go back in time and do the exact same thing again, knowing the consequences, but there was something between us—a light shifting of air, a pulsing in her bond with the pack and the muted power of the Mark on my side—that told me that wasn’t so.

  She was asking if I could rewire someone else’s pack-bond. She was asking if I could rewire hers. Lake and her dad were peripherals. Callum didn’t require their attendance at the Crescent, but they were still a part of Callum’s pack. He was still her alpha.

  “I don’t know, Lake.”

  Could you try? I didn’t hear the words, the way I would have if my bond with Chase didn’t stand between Callum’s pack and my mind, but I could see the question on the tip of her tongue. After a moment, she bit her lip, and whatever I’d imagined I’d seen disappeared, replaced by a look I associated with Lake’s reaction to being dared to do something.

  An alarm sounded in the back of my head, because that look was trouble. Lake Mitchell didn’t turn down dares.

  “I suspect you’re wanting to know why Callum didn’t kill the Rabid,” Lake said.

  Cautiously, I nodded.

  “And I suspect you’re wanting to know if he has plans to kill the Rabid now that he’s back?”

  This was why I had dealt Lake in. She had no inhibition, no sense of propriety, and she was fearless. Pack or not, she wouldn’t shy away from pressing Callum’s buttons. Growing up removed from Ark Valley had given her the luxury of following her own will more than the alpha’s, and right now, Callum’s privacy and hallowed judgment didn’t command her respect nearly as well as my need to make sure that this Rabid was put down.

  “If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.” I said those words out loud for the first time and knew that it wasn’t a bluff. It wasn’t me blustering or running off at the mouth without thinking. It wasn’t foolishness, and it didn’t matter that I was human and the Rabid was not.

  He’d messed with what was mine. He’d killed my family. He’d hurt Chase. And the only way to get him out of Chase’s head forever was to see him dead.

  I told Lake as much, and she didn’t even blink. She didn’t ask me how exactly one human girl was going to take down a Rabid that had been evading our entire pack for over a decade. She just took me at my word and moved on to the next order of business.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  I looked out at the water, working my way through the situation, taking into account everything I knew about Lake, the Wayfarer, and her brand of persuasion. I thought of the human bartender, with her talk-to-me face and eyes that didn’t look like they missed much, and I thought about the kind of clientele that a place run by a peripheral male would naturally attract.

  Wolves weren’t solitary creatures. Where there was one werewolf, sooner or later, there were more, and Mitch and Lake weren’t our pack’s only peripherals.

  “I think I need you to talk to the bartender,” I said, turning the idea slowly over in my mind. If any of Callum’s other wolves had been here, the bartender would know, and if she’d gotten them drunk enough, they might have talked. Lake didn’t ask for the rationale behind my request. She just stood up and made her way back to the restaurant, because she knew as well as I did that any good plan started with recon.

  It wasn’t until Lake and I were sitting on stools in front of the bar that I thought to wonder how exactly a human female had ended up working for Lake’s dad. Looking for answers, I closed my eyes and let my senses take over. The woman in question smelled like Walmart soap and evergreen trees. She bore no Marks and had no connection to the pack. Not to Stone River, and not to any of the others. She wasn’t on edge and there wasn’t the slightest whiff of fear in the air around her. From somewhere behind us, I heard a rustle, and my fingers curled reflexively into fists.

  Wolf.

  And not one of ours, either.

  “Easy, girl,” Lake said, even though I got the feeling that the intruder’s presence sent her hackles up, same way it did mine. “This here’s neutral territory. We welcome all types.”

  Technically speaking, this wasn’t neutral territory, and it wasn’t Lake’s. Montana was Stone River territory. It belonged to Callum, and the wolf behind us did not.

  “He’s a peripheral,” Lake told me. “One of Shay’s.”

  I hadn’t had much practice identifying other packs by smell, but I recognized the name. Shay was the youngest alpha in North America. He’d challenged the former leader of the Snake Bend Pack around the turn of the century and won. Like Devon, Shay was a purebred Were, and Sora was his mother, too. Technically, that made him Devon’s half-brother, but since neither of us particularly cared for him, we didn’t think of him that way. Shay had broken all ties with his family—and Callum—long before either Devon or I were born.

  “Your dad lets Shay’s wolves eat here?” I asked. It w
as unfathomable.

  “Only the peripherals, and only the ones that can mind their manners,” Lake said. “It doesn’t hurt to have friends.”

  I tried to see the sense in that, however much my instincts were telling me it was wrong-wrong-wrong. I’d thought that the Wayfarer was a resting point for Stone River peripherals, but given the host of smells in the air, its clientele was far more eclectic than I’d given it credit for.

  All the more reason to talk to the bartender and find out what she knew.

  “I’m Bryn.” I opened my eyes again and met hers, and if she noticed that I’d been smelling her, she didn’t comment on it.

  “Keely.” For a long moment that was all she said, and then she turned and narrowed her eyes at Lake. “You up to something?”

  Lake’s lips worked their way into an easy grin. “Always. You heard anything about a Rabid?”

  I’d expected her to finesse the question more, but who was I kidding? This was Lake. Keely paused for a moment and then snorted. “If I lied, you’d smell it, so I’ll stick with that’s no concern of yours and suggest you leave it at that.”

  Lake opened her mouth to argue, but I pinched her leg in the age-old sign for shut up and let me do the talking.

  “You know about werewolves,” I said, meeting Keely’s gaze.

  “I expect I might,” Keely allowed.

  “And you’re not dead.”

  Keely snorted. “This one sure knows how to sweet-talk a girl, doesn’t she, Lake?”

  I wondered if Callum knew that there were humans in Montana who knew who and what we were, but if he didn’t, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. “The fact that you’re alive means you know how to keep your mouth shut. I can respect that.”

  Lake pinched my leg. I ignored her.

  “So I won’t ask you about any Rabids or any secrets.”

  Another pinch. Harder this time. I swatted Lake’s hand away.

  “But I am going to ask what you’ve heard about what it takes for a human to become a Were.”