Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The pack was mine.
And this time, I’d die before I let anyone take that away.
An hour later, the Weres had settled reluctantly back into their human forms, and I’d managed to remember that I was human. Madison and one of the other older Resilients began helping the little ones into new clothes, and for the first time, I realized that some of the children weren’t that much older than the twins. The youngest was two, maybe three. Red-haired and solemn, she toddled toward me the second Madison got her into a faded hand-me-down dress. I knelt and let the little one come into my arms, and I settled her on my hip with an ease that I never could have managed before Alex and Katie.
An ease that felt too natural even now, given that this girl should have been a stranger to me.
Lily.
Her name came to me, in the recesses of my mind, like I’d always known it. Her small head leaned contentedly against my chest, and what she knew of life passed into my consciousness. Wilson—sweet and scary and oh, he’d hurt her once. Red. The bad color. Bad things. Blood. A ratty stuffed bunny whose neck had been ripped out. Cotton in her mouth. Not allowed to cry.
And then, there was me.
In her eyes, I was beautiful. Tall. Powerful.
I was safe.
Craning my head so that our eyes could meet, I breathed out slightly, and she sniffed like crazy, trying to absorb the smell of my breath.
“Hello, Lily,” I said softly. “I’m Bryn.”
Lily nodded, and then, with a tentative smile, she turned and pointed, a quizzical look on her face. I followed her finger directly to Chase.
He crossed the room in three broad steps, his motions flowing, as they always did, like water. He brought his face next to mine and rubbed my cheek with his. And then, silently, he turned to Lily, and with a small smile, he huffed out a breath, allowing her to catch his scent.
Through the pack-bond, I sensed that to Lily, Chase smelled like me. Pine needles and cinnamon.
I closed the space between my body and Chase’s, or maybe he did, and Lily laid her head back down on my chest, content to be nestled between us as my face and Chase’s found their way back together. Cheek to cheek. Forehead to forehead. Nose to nose. Then, lip to lip. As the kiss stretched out over a delicious, unbearable eternity, I felt myself folding into his mind and welcoming him into mine. For a single second, the world stopped rotating on its axis and the hum of the rest of our pack went very, very still.
And then, the silence and stillness were broken as I felt the Weres in the room stiffen and heard the beginning of a growl in the back of Chase’s throat.
Something’s coming.
We didn’t get more than a moment’s warning, or two, before the front door to Wilson’s cabin exploded inward, and Weres began pouring in. I broke away from Chase, and instantly, the sounds of the rest of my pack—Mine—were back, louder than ever before.
Ours. Ours. Ours.
This was our territory. These men were trespassing. And the wolves inside of each of my pack-mates knew beyond knowing that the pack was to be protected, the alpha was to be obeyed, and trespassers were to be killed.
What started as a low rumble in our bond became audible snarling, and even though I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of controlling anyone else—even if they’d chosen, and were still choosing, to let me—I pulled back tightly on my end of the bond, restraining them all with a single word. “Hold!”
“You?” It took me a second to locate the person speaking, and a few more beats to recognize him. He looked more like Devon than he should have, the expression on his face twisting familiar features into something ugly.
Shay.
I stiffened and let my senses reach past the borders of my new pack, my Resilient pack, and when I stepped out from behind the psychic shield of our numbers, the power in the room hit me like a blow to the stomach. I’d felt it before, in Chase’s body, but now, I felt something new. Instead of cowering or running away, my instinct was to protect what was mine: my territory, my wolves, my status. This was the Senate. These were alphas, but the roar of the pack I led at the edges of my mind, the way they held back on my command and my command only, forced me to accept an unforgiving, unlikely truth.
These men were alphas. So was I.
“Callum.” My eyes sought him out, and my mouth made the word of its own volition. I felt like I’d never said it before, like it was a word in a foreign language that I didn’t speak. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. Wasn’t sure what—or who—he was. To me.
To the wolves I was bound to protect.
“Bryn,” Callum returned calmly. “Seems you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of trouble.”
One of the other alphas snorted. “Where’s Wilson?”
“The Rabid?” I asked, seething warmth making its way from my stomach up the back of my throat and out of my mouth as pure venom. “The one who attacked and killed defenseless children in his pursuit of turning other kids into werewolves? The one who was using his ability to do so as a leg up into the Senate’s hierarchy? That Wilson?”
“Yes. That Wilson.” Shay didn’t like me. I met his eyes full-on and didn’t even blink. Let him not like me. The feeling was mutual.
“Oh,” I said lightly. “That Wilson is dead.”
Shay moved forward then, in a blindingly quick motion, and instinct told me that he would have closed his hand around my throat and slammed me against the nearest wall had it not been for the fact that in a move just as quick, each and every one of the wolves in my pack moved to defend me. Chase stepped directly in front of me, so close that my nose almost touched his back. Lake pulled to my side, and the children flanked her—even Lily, who twisted out of my grasp and leapt out toward Shay, her teeth flashing, like she hadn’t quite learned yet that they weren’t as potent in human form as they were when she was a wolf.
If I’d let her, she would have torn him to pieces.
But ultimately, it was Devon’s presence, massive and looming, that stilled Shay’s forward motion. The two of them faced off: Dev young and perfectly groomed, even in the middle of chaos; Shay a mirror of everything Dev could have been if he’d cared more about being a purebred werewolf than being a person.
“Back. Off.” Devon said the words slowly, giving each of them the weight of its own sentence. A ripple of unrest went throughout the room, the alphas shifting from one foot to another, their eyes on the confrontation.
Challenge.
Dev tilted his head slightly to the side, and I wondered which character he was playing, or if this was 100 percent Devon Macalister, down to the set of his jaw.
Challenge.
Dominance.
“Dev.” I said his name quietly, knowing this could get ugly if I didn’t stop it. At the sound of my voice, Devon broke eye contact with Shay and took a step back, closer to me.
“She’s their alpha,” a man who smelled like sea salt and sulfur breathed, his green eyes flecked with yellow, his pupils widening. “The children think they’re hers.”
They didn’t just think they were mine, I wanted to say. They were mine. I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t exactly see the logic behind the choice, but there it was.
I was the one who’d set them free.
I was the one who’d showed them what they could do. I was the person they’d chosen to connect to, and because I’d started it all, I was at the center of the things that connected us all.
I was theirs. And even though I was their alpha, even the smallest of my pack-mates seemed to sense that I was also the most vulnerable. The weakest physically. The one that Shay wanted to disembowel.
“I didn’t kill Wilson.” My voice—barely more than a whisper—echoed with the power of the entire pack, a frenzied blood-thirst that made me sound less human than I was. “They did. The ones he Changed. The ones you let him Change.”
Lily growled, and coming from a cherubic two-year-old, the sound seemed more demonic than lupine.
“They’re free
“You can’t honestly believe we’d let you keep them,” Shay said, his tone incredulous. Every instinct I had said that he was challenging me and that staring him down almost definitely wasn’t going to get me out of this one. Like flame and tinder, the challenge caught on; I could feel it spreading across the room from one alpha to another. They were stronger than I was. One on one, I didn’t stand a chance against any of them. Even surrounded by Resilient werewolves who’d do anything I asked them to, I was outclassed. Resilient or not, my wolves were just kids, and every alpha in this room except me numbered their years in centuries.
I’m not backing down. I tried to let them see that in my face. I may have been outclassed, but if these alphas thought they could take even one of these kids from me when they’d been perfectly content to leave them to a Rabid in exchange for new wolves of their own, they were mistaken.
I won’t back down. Not now. Not ever. Even if I was signing my own death warrant.
My gaze flickered over to Callum, and his amber eyes focused on mine in a way that made me wonder if he was seeing me at four or five or six or ten, or any age up until the point that Ali had taken me away.
Bryn. I didn’t hear his voice in my head, but I saw that single word—my name—in his eyes. Saw the recognition behind it. The feeling. And something else: a look I knew, one I’d seen many times before. It was a look that pushed me. One that challenged me to take everything he’d ever taught me and think. There was a way out of this dilemma, but I had to find it and set it in motion myself.
So I did what Callum’s eyes bid me and thought. And the answer was there, in everything I knew about the men in this room and everything Callum had taught me about maneuvering my way around werewolves.
“Actually,” I said, finally responding to Shay’s words, my eyes still on Callum’s, “I do think you’ll let me keep them. Because this isn’t Europe. This isn’t Asia. And in North America, alphas don’t take other alphas’ wolves. We don’t challenge each other, and if you want to take what’s mine, you’re going to have to challenge me.”
You’re going to have to kill me. Those words went unstated, but every single person in the room understood that they were there, and a wave of static energy pulsed through the air. Alphas didn’t like being challenged. Especially not by females. Especially not by humans.
Especially not by me.
“Seems to me the girl has a point,” Callum said, his face neutral, his body perfectly relaxed in a way that would have scared the daylights out of anyone with enough sense to know that Callum wasn’t the type to get mad.
He got even.
“By Senate law, if a wolf wants to transfer packs, both alphas have to sign off on it, and Bryn seems a bit resistant to that idea,” Callum continued.
Shay growled. “You can’t be serious, Callum. She’s human! She’s weak. If we want what she has, we’ll take it. I’ll take it.”
Callum didn’t growl, but he must have stopped holding back, stopped shielding his power from the others, because in the next instant, something ancient and undeniable flooded the room. This was what it meant to be alpha. This was what real power felt like.
Each and every one of the men in the room stumbled. I didn’t even blink.
“Now, see, that depends,” Callum said, his voice still neutral, his face still blank. “On whether or not we consider ourselves a democracy.”
I couldn’t help the satisfied smile that spread slowly over my lips. I’d seen this coming. I’d set him up to say it. If the Senate was a democracy, none of the alphas in this room could challenge me or take a single wolf that belonged to me. And if we weren’t a democracy, well …
In that case, Callum had no reason to hold back. No reason to recognize anyone else’s claims to their wolves.
“Well, Shay, are we a democracy or aren’t we?” I took great pleasure in throwing those words, the exact words Shay had used to force a vote on the Rabid, back into the Snake Bend alpha’s face.
Game. Set. Match.
No one wanted to challenge Callum, and to take what was mine, that was exactly what they were going to have to do. I wasn’t sure if this was just some cog in a greater scheme of Callum’s, some detail that had to fall into place for the future he most desired, or if maybe he was doing this for me. Because I mattered. Because maybe I was worth it.
My chest tightened, and I could almost hear the sound of glass shattering as something inside me broke, but I couldn’t risk letting anyone else see the breaking, so I kept my face carefully neutral, like someone who’d learned from the very best.
“I think we’re done here,” I said, daring the alphas, any single one of them, to tell me we weren’t. “You can see yourselves to the door.” For a moment, I thought Callum would throw his head back and roar with laughter, but he didn’t. He just glanced up at the ceiling as one by one, I met the other alphas’ gazes, and one by one, they turned away and filed out the door, their hatred for me and the way Callum had tied their hands palpable in the air. As I watched them go, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someday they’d be back. Maybe not to this cabin. Maybe not anytime soon, but eventually, some or all of these alphas would decide that the prize was worth the gamble. They’d call Callum’s bluff and take their chances. And when they did, things were going to get ugly.
Finally, I brought my face back to Callum’s, and out of habit, my hand went to my waist, to the Mark that had once connected the two of us into something more. For a moment, I felt a pang for what we’d lost, but that longing was drowned out by a moment of prescience, one that told me that Callum knew as well as I did that this wasn’t the end. Not between the two of us and not with the Senate. Someday, the other alphas would strike back.
And when they did, we’d be ready. I’d be ready.
For the first time in my life, Callum looked away from my gaze before I looked away from his, a slight, knowing smile playing at the corners of his lips. Then, without a word, he turned and followed the other alphas out the door, until the only ones left in the cabin were the ones whose minds and heartbeats I knew as well as my own. The ones whose strength and power pulled at me from all directions, with the familiar call of alpha, alpha, alpha.
Pack, pack, pack, I whispered back, my mind to theirs. Let’s run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“HEY, COULD I GET A REFILL ON THIS COFFEE?”
“That depends,” Lake said, looking at the customer with dancing eyes before turning to shout toward the bar. “Maddy, you want me to shoot him?”
Maddy—who’d joined Lake as a waitress and proven that the only thing more terrifying than one of them was two—pretended to think it over for a moment and then shook her head. “If you shoot him, it’ll take him longer to run far, far away. And besides, it might hurt your tip.”
Lake turned back to the man in question—one of many Weres who’d ventured into the Wayfarer in the two months since it had become the center of a new territory. Montana and western North Dakota no longer belonged to the Stone River Pack. The Wayfarer and the land surrounding it for a good hundred miles on either side belonged to the newly minted Cedar Ridge Pack, courtesy of Callum.
Technically speaking, the new territory belonged to me.
There was a part of me—the human part—that still believed it was all semantics, that I was an alpha in name only, because Weres couldn’t understand the idea of a pack without one. But there was another part—the part of me that knew every second of every day where each and every one of my wolves was—that recognized that the title wasn’t a meaningless one. It wasn’t empty.
It was real.
But it was different, too, from the way things had been in Callum’s pack. The wolves in Cedar Ridge and I were all connected, but until or unless we were threatened, I didn’t control that connection, and I didn’t use it to control anyone else. I hadn’t spent my entire life r
None of the adults in our lives had been particularly pleased with our adventure to Alpine Creek. Our parents had arrived at the cabin just after the battle of wills with the Senate had ended—and needless to say, Lake and I hadn’t fared quite as well against Ali and Mitch as we had against the entire werewolf establishment. I’d spent most of the summer grounded, and with the new school year fast approaching, Ali and Mitch had only backed off because, laissez-faire alpha or not, my mood tended to trickle down into the others, and a pack of stir-crazy juvenile wolves was nobody’s friend.
“Want another root beer?” Keely asked me.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
The man who’d futilely asked for more coffee turned to glare at me, but all I did was raise an eyebrow, and he looked very quickly away.
There were seventeen werewolves permanently in residence at the Wayfarer now—Lake, Mitch, Katie, Alex, Devon, and twelve of the kids we’d rescued from Alpine Creek. Some of the others—mostly teens—had chosen to make their way elsewhere. I hadn’t objected. The two who’d been attacked most recently had gone home, with the understanding that the local pack would treat them like visiting dignitaries and not try to claim them or enforce any dominance of their own. For now. Two or three others, all eighteen years old (or close enough to it to convince Ali they didn’t need constant supervision), were playing at being peripheral, though my pack-sense—alpha-sense—told me that none of them would stay gone for long.
You’re quiet today.
The sound of Chase’s voice in my head made my lips curve slowly upward. There were moments when my pack-sense was still, and for seconds, maybe minutes at a time, I could remember what it had been like when the two of us were the only people in my head.