Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Opening my eyes, I traced the pattern rising over the band of my jeans: three parallel marks, scars I would carry for the rest of my life. For most of my childhood, the Mark had been a visible symbol to the pack that had raised me that I was one of their own, that anyone who messed with me messed with the werewolf who’d dug his fingers into my flesh hard enough to leave scars.
Callum.
He was the alpha of alphas, the Were who’d saved my life when I was four years old and spent the next decade plus grooming me for a future I’d never even imagined. No matter how many months passed, every time my pack assembled, every time I lost myself and ran as one of them, I thought of the first time, of Callum and his wolves and knowing that for once in my life, I belonged.
Every time I heard the word alpha beckoning to me from my pack’s minds, I thought of the man who’d once been mine—and then I thought of the other alphas, none of whom would have been particularly distraught if I went to sleep one night and never woke up.
Ah, werewolf politics. My favorite.
Bryn.
The moment I heard Chase’s voice, soft and unassuming, in my mind, every other thought vanished. It was always this way with the two of us, and the anticipation of seeing him, touching him, taking in his scent was almost as powerful as the feeling that washed over my body the moment he emerged from the forest, clothed in shorts and a T-shirt that didn’t quite fit.
Chase had been a werewolf for less than a year. Ironically, that made him seem far less human than Weres who’d been born that way or the members of our pack who’d been Changed as kids. The difference was visible in the way he moved, the tilt of his head. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been in flux, defined by the wolf inside as much as the boy he’d been before the attack.
Now, slowly, things I’d felt in his memories and dreams, quirks he’d shown only in flashes seemed to be fighting their way back to the surface. Each time he came home from patrolling our territory as my eyes and ears, I saw a little bit more of his human side.
Each time, he was a little more Chase.
“Hey, you.” Chase smiled, more with one side of his mouth than the other.
“Hey,” I echoed, a smile tugging at my own lips. “How’s tricks?”
I took those words leaving my mouth as a sign that I’d been hanging around Devon for way, way too long, but Chase didn’t so much as blink.
“Same old, same old.” He was quiet, this boy I was getting to know piece by piece—thoughtful, observant, and restrained, even as the power in his stride betrayed the wolf inside. “How’s school going?”
“Same old, same old.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘same old, same old’ with you,” Chase said wryly. “You’re Bryn.”
Given my track record, he kind of had a point there, but I wasn’t about to admit it out loud.
With that same half smile, he leaned toward me, hesitant, but inhumanly graceful. I answered the question in his eyes, reached for the back of his head, brought his lips down to mine.
Soon. Soon. Soon.
I could feel his heart beating, feel his mind and thoughts blending with my own as the two of us stood there, bathed in moonlight and feeling its effects like a drug.
Whoever Chase was, he was mine.
“Ahem.”
I’d known before I kissed Chase that we’d be interrupted. There was no such thing as a secret in a wolf pack—let alone privacy. But I’d been foolishly optimistic and hoped that the interrupter would be Lake or Maddy or one of the younger kids.
Instead, as Chase and I pulled away from each other, we were confronted with the oldest member of our pack, a gruff, weatherworn man who didn’t look a day over thirty-five. Based on the way his lips were twitching, I concluded that the man in question was torn between smiling and scowling.
“Hey, Mr. Mitchell,” I said, hoping to push him toward the smiling end of the spectrum. A guarded look settled over Chase’s eyes, but he echoed my greeting, and Lake’s dad gave us a long, measuring stare in return.
“I suspect the earth would keep rotating round the sun even if the two of you called me Mitch.”
In the time I’d been living on the Mitchells’ land, Mitch and I had had this conversation more than once, but I wasn’t really the type to give in once I dug my heels in about something.
“So noted, Mr. Mitchell.”
The smile finally won out over his scowl, but it lasted only a second or two before Mitch eyed the space (or lack thereof) between my body and Chase’s. “Last I heard, Ali was on her way here with the twins,” he said, which I took as a not-so-subtle hint that Chase and I should give each other some breathing room. Chase must have interpreted it the same way, because he stepped back—away from me and away from Mitch, who delivered the rest of his update with a nod. “Lake and Maddy are rounding up the troops, and I believe Devon said something about making an entrance.”
I was fairly certain that I was the only alpha in the history of the world to have a second-in-command who appreciated the impact of arriving fashionably late. Then again, I was also the only alpha with as many females in her pack as males and more toddlers and tweens than grown men.
Besides, it wasn’t like the whole human thing was status quo.
“Bryn!” The unmistakable sound of a very small person bellowing ripped me from my thoughts, and I smiled. There was nothing quite like hearing my name yelled at the top of a three-year-old’s lungs—unless it was having the aforementioned three-year-old barrel into me full blast and throw her arms around my legs like she was afraid that if she let go, I’d disappear off the face of the earth forever.
“Hello, Lily,” I said wryly. The kid acted like she hadn’t seen me in a lifetime or two, even though it had only been an hour, if that.
Moon! Happy! Fun!
With the older wolves, I had to go looking for thoughts, unless someone was using the pack-bond to actively send them my way, but with Lily, everything was right there on the surface, bubbling up the way only the strongest emotions did in adults.
Alpha-alpha-alpha! Bryn-Bryn-Bryn!
The two words—alpha and Bryn—blended together in her mind. As the youngest of the kids I’d saved from the werewolf equivalent of a psychopath, Lily was one of the only ones who couldn’t remember the time before our pack, or the things that the Rabid had done to her, to all of them.
In Lily’s mind, Bryn meant alpha, and alpha meant Bryn. It was as simple as that.
“Can we Change yet?” Lily asked. “Can we, can we, can we?”
Not yet, Lily, I answered silently, and she stilled, mesmerized by a power I’d never asked to hold over anyone.
“Lily, I told you to wait.” The voice that issued that statement was aggrieved, and the look on its owner’s face was one I recognized all too well from my own childhood.
Come to think of it, it was a look I recognized all too well from about a week ago, two tops.
“Hey, Ali,” I said, glad that Chase and I had heeded Mitch’s warning and put a little space between my body and his.
“Hey, baby,” Ali replied, a twin on each hip. “Everyone’s been fed, but I make no guarantees about their state of mind.”
For most of my life, it had been just Ali and me, but she’d taken to managing an entire brood with the same efficiency with which she’d once transformed herself from a twenty-year-old college student into my protector within Callum’s pack. Ali was human, but the words force of nature still applied, and I would infinitely rather have tangled with an irritated werewolf than Ali in mama bear mode.
“Now?” Lily asked, right on cue with Ali’s disclaimer about the younger werewolves’ state of mind. “Now-now-now?”
“Shhhh,” I said, and Lily closed her mouth and laid her head against my knee.
“You know, Bryn,” Ali said thoughtfully, “if Lily minded me half as well as she minds you, I wouldn’t be considering renaming her Bryn Two.”
“Ha-ha,” I retorted. “Very funny.”
He smiled. “I’ve got them,” he told Ali, and she nodded before kissing the twins and turning to walk back out of the woods. Ali never stayed to run with the pack.
As far as I knew, she never had.
Now, Bryn? Now?
Lily refrained from asking the question out loud, but I heard it through the pack-bond all the same, and this time, the answer—soon, soon, soon—seemed to come from outside my body, from instincts I couldn’t have explained to the human world. Lily seemed to feel it, too, and a keening, whimpering sound built in the back of her throat. I ran a hand gently over her bright red hair and she began rocking back and forth on her feet. Within moments, the others had arrived, filling the clearing, and the effect was magnified a hundred times.
Our pack was small—twenty-two total, only eighteen there that night—but the air was electric, and as their thoughts swirled with my own, the connection between us became a living, breathing thing. I felt them, all of them: Lake and Maddy, Lily and the twins, Chase. From the youngest to the oldest, from those who thirsted for a hunt to those who wanted nothing more in life than to run …
They were mine.
Devon slid in beside me, and the moment I felt the brush of his arm against mine, I knew.
It was time.
In other packs, this was formal. There were petitions and ceremonies and marks carved into flesh, but here and now, I didn’t have words, and they didn’t need them.
Now. Now. Now.
I couldn’t deny the Change any more than they could. The treetops scattered moonlight across our faces, and I inclined my head. That was all it took.
At any other time of the month, the sound of tearing fabric and crunching bones wasn’t a pleasant one, but under the full moon, the effect was like the beating of a drum.
Run. Run. Run.
All around me, they could taste it. They could feel it. Furred bodies pushed at each other to get closer to me, to touch me, to sniff me, to be with me, and the roar from their minds was overwhelming.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.
I forgot about Chase, about Devon, about each and every one of them as anything other than my brothers, my sisters, my people, my pack.
Mine.
This was what I’d been born for. This was all that I wanted and all that I was, and as one overwhelming, unstoppable, incredible force, we ran.
CHAPTER TWO
SATED AND SOOTHED, THE PACK SLEPT. MY ALL-TOO-HUMAN body was worn past all endurance, but for the first time in days, my pack-sense was calm, and the others’ minds were quiet in my own. Their presences ebbed and flowed at the edge of my consciousness, and as I finally collapsed onto my bed, the protests of my aching body dissolved into infinity, into nothing.
I dreamed of wet grass and fallen leaves that crunched under my bare feet as I walked. I couldn’t see my body, couldn’t make out the outline of a single rock or tree, but I shrugged off the blindness as a mild inconvenience. My body knew what it was doing better than I did, and the scents I took in with each step were rich and familiar: damp soil and dew, cedar and cinnamon.
A sound. To my left.
My nose twitched and I whirled, my hair fanning out around me, my knees bent, ready to pounce.
Ready, if necessary, to run.
For a moment, there was silence. A twig snapped. Leaves rustled, and then I made out the faint sound of paws on wet ground.
A wolf.
I knew that much with certainty, but who the wolf was and why it had come here, I had no idea. The list of people who wanted to see me dead wasn’t short enough that I could ignore the possibility of a threat. Still, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t coerce my feet into moving, couldn’t keep my body from crouching down or my arm from moving to hold out a beckoning hand, palm up.
What was I doing?
The wolf moved closer, until I could feel the heat of its body, the warmth of its breath against my palm. I wanted to see, willed myself to see, and then there was light.
The wolf in question was female, larger than some but, based on the size of her paws, not quite full grown. She was thin—and, I knew instinctively, fast—built along lean, muscular lines that were almost masked by thick honey-brown fur that gave way to darker markings around her face and a bit of white near each of her paws.
She brought her eyes to mine, and there was something regal about the motion. I held my breath. I waited. She showed her teeth. She ducked her head. Finally, slowly, she stepped forward, that much closer to my outstretched hand.
And then the world froze and we were caught like that, inches apart, neither one of us able to close the gap. I fought the paralysis, but it didn’t break until the scene around me had shifted and I found myself back in the clearing, the ground covered in snow, my body wrapped up in layers and layers of clothing and the wind whipping my hair at my face. It took me a moment to remember that after our run, I’d gone back to the cabin and fallen asleep in my own bed.
I’m still asleep, I thought. I’m at home in my bed, asleep. This is just a dream.
Despite the realization, I looked for the rest of my pack. I searched for them, with my eyes and with the part of me that knew each and every one of them like they were extensions of my own body.
I looked for the strange wolf who’d almost brought her nose to touch my hand.
But all I saw was a human, a stranger. A man. The part of my brain that thought like a girl recognized the cockiness in his expression and put his age at five or six years older than me.
The part of me that thought like Pack felt his presence like white noise, high-pitched and deafening.
Threat. Threat. Threat.
My instincts returned full throttle, and I braced myself for a fight, but the man never blinked, his light eyes focused on mine, his head tilted slightly to one side. Slowly, he raised his right hand, the same way I’d beckoned forward the wolf.
I felt the fight drain out of me, like a tire going flat. Mesmerized, I walked toward the stranger with the diamond-hard eyes, and a serpentine smile spread over his face. Flames leapt to life at the ends of his fingertips, and I froze.
Eyes glittering, he lifted one flaming hand and waved.
Just a dream, I told myself. It’s just a dream.
With the smell of smoke thick in my nostrils, I woke up.
“Have to say, Bryn, you look like the kind of happy that’s not.” Keely softened those words by setting a root beer float down in front of me on the bar and dangling a straw just out of my grasp. “What gives, kid?”
By profession, Keely was a bartender. By nature, she was supernaturally good at getting secrets out of people, and in the past six months, she’d become the third in the trio of adults in all of our lives, the cool aunt to Mitch’s and Ali’s more parental presences.
Long story short: no matter how much I didn’t want to talk about the way I’d woken up that morning, covered in sweat and ready to swear that the house was on fire, I didn’t stand a chance of keeping my mouth shut.
Knowing my own limitations, I leaned forward and grabbed the straw out of her hand. “Nothing gives. I just didn’t sleep very well.”
Because werewolves had a habit of sniffing out lies—literally—I’d spent years training myself to tiptoe around the truth. Rather than fight the compulsion to tell Keely everything she wanted to know, I made an effort at telling her the most abbreviated version of the truth I could manage.
“Bad dreams.”
Keely tilted her head to the side. “What kind of bad dreams?”
I thought on the question for a couple of seconds before the bartender’s uncanny ability for getting answers—which we called a knack—had my lips moving completely of their own volition.
“One s
“Do you think it was anything?” Keely’s question was deceptively simple, and she masked its significance by turning her back on me and going to get refills for the handful of other patrons who’d found themselves at the Wayfarer on Thanksgiving Day.
Grateful for the temporary respite, I considered her question: did I think there was something to this dream?
Yes.
Whether the answer was mine as a human or the result of the pack-sense that had long since woven itself into the pattern of my thoughts, I couldn’t say. In either case, I wasn’t keen to share it with Keely, who would relay my answer to Mitch, who told everything to Ali, no questions asked.
Sometimes Keely’s knack really sucked.
Taking a final slurp of my root beer float, I slipped off the bar stool and headed for the exit. “Bye, Keely.”
Behind me, Keely snorted. “Leaving so soon?”
Once I was safely out of range, I paused to give Keely a disgruntled look and caught sight of Lake plunking her elbows down on a nearby pool table. I could tell by Lake’s posture that she was preparing to lecture a couple of our twelve-year-old pack-mates on the art of the hustle.
“If you go in looking like you could tear them to pieces, they’ll hedge their bets. The trick is to look completely defenseless.”
I found myself nodding in agreement with Lake’s lesson, because those were words to live by—in pool and in life.
The way Keely looked and the fact that she was human kept most Weres from realizing that she had a way of making people admit things they had no desire to say out loud, and it wasn’t like I looked like much of a threat. Our entire pack was a testament to the power of being underestimated. We were younger and smaller and newer to the werewolf game than any of the other packs, but like Keely—like me—my charges were more than they appeared to be.