Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“She reformed their bonds.” Sora’s voice was dull. “They’re each other’s first, and Pack second.” I felt her prowling near me psychically, testing the limits of our bond, trying to undo whatever it was that I’d done.
“That’s not possible,” Lance said, exchanging a look with Sora, one that reminded me that they had hundreds of years’ experience reading the ins and outs of each other’s expressions. “Is it?”
“Mine,” Chase said, rubbing his cheek against the side of my neck. I shivered, the touch between us electrifying.
“Mine,” I agreed, burying my hand in his hair, “but in a non-freaky, non-ownership, we-both-retain-our-independence kind of way.” I nudged Chase. “Right?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
In retrospect, it was probably a very good thing that he hadn’t been born a Were.
“They’re coming.” Sora again, her voice just as emotionless.
“Who?” I asked.
“Anyone close enough to feel what just happened,” Sora replied. She closed her eyes, sensing them, and I wondered if I could still do the same—if I tried. “Marcus. The Collins brothers. Everyone your age but Devon. Some of the wives.”
Casey breathed in sharply. “This is bad.”
A low, rumbling sound emanated from Lance’s chest.
Very bad, I translated for Chase.
Holding me this tightly, he couldn’t understand how anything between us could be bad. Not when it felt so right. Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—I was human enough that the warm hum between us, the feel of his skin on mine, didn’t convince me that we were safe. We were together, but we were also screwed.
Especially me.
The survival instinct that had led me to do whatever it was that I’d just done wasn’t worth much more than spit. How many of Callum’s conditions had I broken here? I’d not only disobeyed the wolves I was supposed to be submitting to, I’d challenged their dominance over me and over Chase and somehow rewired things to weaken it. I’d taken the bond—which I’d agreed to open so that I could come here—and instead of shutting it back off, I’d channeled it into something new. The pack was still connected to me, and I was still connected to them, but that was filtered through the overwhelming, all-absorbing sameness that flowed from me to Chase and back again.
I’d approached Callum as a member of the pack, I’d disobeyed him as a member of the pack, and from the slightly green tone to Casey’s skin and the fact that Sora wasn’t yelling at me, I knew what that meant.
I was dead.
Ali and Devon would never, ever forgive me for this. Worse, they’d never forgive Callum.
“No,” Chase growled, standing up and shoving me behind him. “They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them.”
“You don’t have a choice, son.” Callum came into the room, stone-faced and weary. And even though the bond between us was muted, drowned out by what I now shared with Chase, I struggled to read him, to sense him, to know what he was thinking, and it came to me.
You don’t have a choice, son. And neither do I.
Pack Justice wasn’t pretty. Like wolves in the wild, Weres who challenged the alpha had to be beaten into submission, or removed altogether. I’d seen grown men torn nearly to pieces for doing less than I’d done here today. They healed. Eventually. Because there wasn’t much beyond a silver bullet or decapitation that a werewolf couldn’t heal from.
But me?
Not good. So, so not good.
“I don’t regret it.” I whispered the words and thought Callum would have a coronary. “You should have told me.”
Of all people, Callum should have told me. He knew me. He’d seen what the Rabid had done to me, and he’d let me go to bed each night, year after year, thinking the monster who’d killed my family was dead.
I shouldn’t have had to find out from someone else that the safety I’d felt in this pack was a lie. That the Rabid was still out there, attacking people. Attacking Chase.
My Chase.
Callum didn’t respond to me. He ignored me. Looked right through me, like I wasn’t even there. Like I was already dead.
“Sora?” he said, his voice deceptively mild. “A moment, if you please?”
Sora nodded, her face a match in every way for his. Callum’s eyes flicked toward Lance and Casey. “Let no one near her. We’ll have justice, but I’m the alpha here, and it will be on my word. Anyone who puts so much as a single mark on her before I say to dies.”
The words knocked the breath out of me.
Bryn? Chase’s voice was tentative in my mind. He wanted to protect me. His wolf wanted to protect me. They wanted to be near me. They didn’t understand why Callum’s words shocked me to my core when my life was already at stake.
“He’s bound by his word,” I murmured, leaning into Chase’s back, pressing my face into his shirt. Callum couldn’t make idle death threats. If anyone harmed me, he’d have to kill them.
Good, Chase’s wolf snuffed. He would help Callum kill anyone else who touched me.
“You couldn’t just leave well enough alone, could you? You couldn’t trust—even this once—that somebody knows better than you. You act without thinking, you always act without thinking, and now—” Casey cut off. “Do you know what this is going to do to Ali?”
Tears sprang to my own eyes, but I couldn’t keep the smart-mouthed answer off my lips. “Well, I think it’s a safe bet that you’ll be sleeping on the couch.”
Casey turned and slammed his fist into Callum’s coffee table, and it split, right down the center. Chase growled, his upper lip curling, his eyes dilating into a swirl of colors.
“It’s okay,” I told him. We’re okay.
He didn’t like Casey yelling at me and wanted to tear into him for violence—even directed at a piece of furniture—so close to …
Oh no, I thought. He did not just think the word mate.
Then again, I kind of had bigger things to worry about than defining my whatever-this-was with Chase. Like the fact that the front door had just been kicked inward, and Weres were already pouring in.
“Outside!” Lance yelled, and even though his dominance no longer had an effect on me, I could sense it, and I could see the effect it had on the others. The others—all of them, yelling and growling and muttering—backed out of the house.
“Anyone who hurts the girl without Callum’s specific permission dies,” Lance said. “This is the word of the alpha.”
“I can’t believe this.” Marcus sneered from just outside the threshold of the door, bloodlust in his eyes, his face flushed. “She broke faith with the pack, and he’s protecting her!”
“He’s doing what needs to be done,” Lance said. “He always does. That’s why he’s the alpha. Do you doubt his authority?”
I read the words unspoken in that question—do you want to challenge him? Marcus was questioning Callum’s judgment. He was playing hopscotch with the line of insubordination, and if he so much as blinked, that would be enough for Callum’s dominance to be called into question.
Enough that Callum would have to kill him to prove a point.
“No,” Marcus snarled. “I don’t doubt the alpha’s authority.”
“Do you challenge it?” Lance took a step toward him, and Marcus bowed his head slightly, his neck arching into a rounded hook.
“No.”
Beside me, Chase was vibrating with fury, his muscles held in check as much by my control as his. Marcus wanted to hurt me. Chase could smell it. His wolf could taste it in the air. And—I pressed further into his mind—there was something familiar about Marcus. About his hatred. About how much he would have enjoyed hurting me.
Chase knew these things. He’d seen them before, in other people, back when he was human.
What Chase knew, I knew. The sensation would have been overwhelming, had I had the luxury of being overwhelmed. Chase was doing a decent job at keeping his wolf under control, but I could feel the charge on his skin, could feel his
Chase arched his back, and if I’d thought he was luminescent before, that didn’t hold a candle to the power pouring off him now.
“Shhhhhh,” I found myself murmuring to him. “Just breathe. You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re okay.”
I needed him to hold it together. I needed, I realized, for him to be safe, no matter what happened to me.
You can’t fight them, I said. No matter what they do to me, you can’t fight them.
He whirled around to face me, zero space in between us. “Can’t I?”
“No.”
No.
The two of us fought our own little dominance battle—Chase and his wolf on one side, me on the other, the bond between us heating up and bringing us closer in conflict than we’d been up to now.
I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I just stared him down. If I’d had a moment to think on it, I probably would have realized that challenging a Were was a bad idea, even if you wore his skin nearly as tightly as your own. The last time I’d seen Chase, Callum and the Rabid had been battling it out for control of Chase’s mind. Now he was mine, and I’d been Pack long enough—Callum’s long enough—to know that in my family, we protected what was ours.
“You have to promise me.” Silently, I set my will against his, intent on having my way on this one thing. This last thing. Out loud, though, I pleaded. And finally, either because of the desperation in my voice or the unmoving, uncompromising steel baring down upon him from my side of the bond, he nodded.
It cost him everything to make the promise, and his pain hit me like a physical blow. I wanted to curl up next to him, to be closer to him, to make the pain go away. He wrapped his arms around me.
“This just figures,” Casey muttered. “Never had a boyfriend, never wanted one, forgets to even brush her hair unless Ali reminds her, and now, this. There’s just no in-between with you, is there?”
I was minutes away from being on the receiving end of terrifying and unquestionably physical retribution. Was now really the time for Casey to be complaining about my dating habits, or lack thereof?
But at the same time, he was right. There wasn’t an in-between for me. I lived at extremes. And maybe I’d die at them, too.
Right. Now.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
I was stupid, and I’d been betrayed, and I wasn’t at all sure which one was worse. I felt Callum come into the room behind me, and as he crossed it, I turned, averting my eyes to keep from looking straight at him. A second later I realized that I needn’t have bothered. It wasn’t like he was looking at me. His movements were stiff, his face unreadable. For what I could only assume was the first time in a thousand years, he looked old.
Callum said nothing to me. He just nodded at Sora, and she walked over and told Chase to move away from me.
He didn’t want to.
He wanted to stay.
To protect.
But he’d promised, and so he let go of me and I of him. “He’s safe?” I asked Sora, knowing deep down that Callum wouldn’t respond.
“Safer than you are,” Sora replied. “His disobedience was mild.”
Chase hadn’t reneged on a pact with our entire community. I had. Message received.
“What’s going to happen to me?” I didn’t want to be asking those words, but there they were.
Sora didn’t answer. She just dragged me from the house, out onto Callum’s front lawn. Callum followed, but didn’t step past the threshold of his door.
“Permissions were granted and conditions were set,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Those conditions weren’t met. Justice demands blood.”
This from Callum. The closest thing to family I had, next to Ali. The man whose Mark I bore—and would always bear—on my flesh. The man who’d lied to me for years and years. The person who for the longest time I’d looked up to most in this world.
“However,” Callum said, and that provoked a hum of grumbles that settled when the alpha demanded silence. “However, the girl is human. Her body would not recover from that which she has rightly earned, and our justice—if it is to be justice—cannot be blind. Sora will serve in my stead. She will extract our pound of flesh.”
I really, really hoped he was talking about a metaphorical pound. Ice-cold terror filled my veins, and from head to toe, I froze.
“But Sora will do so in human form, and only until the girl’s body gives out.”
Gives out?
Gives out how?
“And how will Sora know when it’s enough?” Ironically enough, that question—which was on the tip of my tongue, too—came from Marcus, his lips twisted into a colorless sneer. “Who is she to judge? The pack will be satisfied. This cannot be a slap on the wrist.” He paused and then added, “Alpha,” with what sounded like respect—probably to stave off a lesson in what challenging the alpha really meant.
“Sora will know,” Callum said, and that was all the warning I got. One moment, things were still being debated in the abstract, and the next, a circle had formed around me and Sora—Devon’s mother, pack, protector—had thrown me to the ground. I scrambled to my feet, but the next second, she came flying at me, a kick delivered to my chest. I flew backward, and there was a popping in my ears. It took me a second to recognize the sound as the cracking of my ribs.
I was lucky she hadn’t broken them in half. But somehow, I didn’t feel lucky. Again, I made my way to my feet, and again, she was upon me. Instinct said to draw my knives, but even I had more sense than that. This was as much of a reprieve as Callum could give me. If I touched silver, I’d lose it.
I’d die.
And I owed Chase more than that. I heard him howling, as if from a great distance, and I knew that he’d lost the battle for control, that he’d Shifted and that it was the wolf and not the boy who was bound now by the promise he’d made me not to interfere.
I lost my tenuous grip on that fleeting thought when Sora backhanded me, strong enough to send me down again. She rained blows down upon me, and I could feel my eyes blackening, my lips swelling, my body hopeless under the barrage.
All of Callum’s training, and this was what I was reduced to. I couldn’t fight, couldn’t resist, couldn’t do anything but let her beat me.
Survive.
The word was a whisper at the back of my throat, a ghost in my mind, maybe even an echo on the wind. I’d given into it before. I’d absorbed it, acted on it.
Survive.
I don’t know how to survive this, I thought. This was me losing my family. My friends. Every illusion of safety I’d ever had. Every promise I’d ever made myself that nobody would make me a victim again.
Survive.
Sora moved to drive a deceptively dainty foot into my side again, but she must have misjudged my position, because she lost her footing and stalled, her elegant, angular face completely blank of emotion and strain. Before she could regain her balance and momentum, I scrambled backward and forced myself to my feet.
My face was wet, warm, and sticky, and I could taste the blood in my mouth. But even then, I knew that I could take much, much more. That this could go on. And on. And on.
When would the pack be satisfied?
How would Sora know when to stop?
Trapped. Fight. Blood. Run.
I could feel the need building inside of me. Could feel the fury threatening to overwhelm my mind, take over my senses.
No.
If I fought back, it would only be worse. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t run. But I had to. My heart was pumping. My ribs were throbbing. There were no sinks to hide under, no strangers to save me.
Fight.
I stood ramrod still. I didn’t move. I didn’t run. I just stood there, hurting, fighting off the haze and the need to taste blood myself.
The need to get out of there alive.
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
I
Danger. Fight. Blood. SURV—
No! The word exploded in my brain, and with it came paralysis. It washed over my body, taking first my legs and then my torso, my arms, even my lips, until I couldn’t manage a single cry when Sora’s fist crashed into my face again.
I wouldn’t fight this.
I couldn’t.
My field of vision exploded, first into red, then into black, and then into nothing. Blessed nothing, and numbness, and as black faded to star-tinged gray, I crumpled to the ground.
Unconscious.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FLOATING IN DEAD MAN’S CREEK, I STARED UP AT the night sky. The dark expanse and the bright stars took turns dominating my visual field, but the oscillation between inky blackness and white-hot light didn’t hurt my eyes, just like the water under and around me didn’t chill my skin.
I didn’t even feel wet.
It was quiet, and I was alone. Until I wasn’t.
He wasn’t there with me physically, but I could feel him, next to me and inside of me, and in the distance, I imagined that I heard his wolf howling. For me.
I closed my eyes, letting the sound rush over me, bringing with it chills and warmth and the unerring desire to howl back. Gone was the night sky, gone was the creek, and when I opened my eyes again, it took me a moment to realize that they weren’t my eyes.
They were his.
Ours.
My vision was sharper now, and the tiny details of the world—each blade of grass, each hair on each head—were so vibrant that I couldn’t see the bigger picture. And then I heard him.
Heard me.
Heard us.
Howling. Screaming. Fear-anger-desperation-NO.
Saw the girl lying on the ground, and then realized that it was me. Blood pooled at her—my—mouth, and the scent was tantalizing. Terrifying.
We needed to go to her. Our vision began to go, overwhelmed by something More.