Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
To herself and to Casey. To the twins.
She wasn’t doing this.
End of story. Finit.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I’D TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN’T STAY MAD AT ME forever, but I have a feeling you’d take that as a challenge.”
Exactly two hours after I’d sworn that Ali would drag me kicking and screaming to the car over my own dead body, I was sitting shotgun, alive and not bloody in the least. I’d been giving her the silent treatment for the past hundred miles—not that it was doing any good.
Part of me understood why she was doing this. If Ali hadn’t been so icily furious on my behalf, I might have hated the pack—and Callum—but if was a luxury for another time. Right now, I could handle being mad at Ali, but I wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, and I wasn’t going to risk the dense vortex of emotions in my gut working their way to the surface. I was not about to break down. Not in this car, not once we got to Montana, not ever.
“You would be doing the same thing,” Ali told me. “If something happened to me, if you were in charge of Katie, and if the pack had attacked her—whatever the reason—you would do the exact same thing.”
“Shut. Up.” I broke my silence.
“I’m doing this, I’m not sorry I’m doing this, and I’m not going to undo it,” Ali said. “Live with it, kiddo.”
“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I shot back. “What happened—it happened to me.” It was bad enough that Callum had taken it upon himself to decide what I could and could not handle knowing with respect to The-Night-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. I wasn’t about to let Ali take this away from me, too. “I’m the one they hurt. I’m the one who bled, I’m the one whose body is so bruised that I might as well start answering to the name ‘Patches,’ and I’m the one who had to watch Callum—”
I broke off. Didn’t want to go there.
“Watch him what?” Ali said evenly.
“Nothing,” I said through clenched teeth. “He did what he could.”
I knew it was wrong to be mad at Ali for trying to protect me, but not Callum for hurting me in the first place. I just didn’t care.
“Do you honestly think that Callum didn’t know what would happen, Bryn? From the moment he left you alone with Chase?” She stared out at the road before us, and I leaned forward and flipped on the radio, hoping to drown out her words.
Her face tightened and then her hand lashed out. My arm, like a creature possessed, jerked upward, throwing up a block to protect my face before my conscious mind had time to realize that all Ali was doing was turning the radio back off.
Unsettled, I lowered my arm and hugged it tight to my chest, feeling small and stupid and laid painfully bare.
If Ali noticed my reaction, she at least had the decency not to call me on it. Instead, she pressed on with the current topic: Callum, justice, and me.
“How many times in your life have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone? He knew damn well you’d break the conditions before he set them down.”
Callum had always known what I was going to do before I did it. I’d spent my entire life trying to get the drop on him.
He knew me.
No. I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t make me. Radio. On.
In the backseat, Katie whimpered from her car seat. Both twins had cried solid for the first hour, and about fifteen minutes back, they’d finally cried themselves out and fallen asleep. My brother and sister weren’t any happier to be leaving than I was.
Shhhhhhh, I told Katie silently. It’s okay. I’m here.
The farther we drove away from Callum’s stronghold, the weaker the twins’ bond to the pack grew, and the more they latched on to Ali and me. Especially me. I was pretty sure that Katie had yet to figure out that I wasn’t a wolf. The night I ran with the pack confused her. Even now, with my own pack-bond muted, I was the closest thing she had to Pack.
To home.
“I can’t feel them anymore,” I muttered, my words lost to the song blaring from the speakers.
It began to rain, and Ali turned the windshield wipers on and the radio off.
“You can’t feel who?”
“The pack. Even after … what I did … they were still there. Faintly.” Chase was just more there. But as the mile markers ticked by, everything was getting fainter, and now I couldn’t feel any of the Weres at all, except for Chase—and I could barely feel him. He existed only as an image, a sound, a feel in the recesses of my brain, but even that was getting harder and harder to hear.
“Chase didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, allowing my ire to take the place of the holes in my soul. “You made them lock him up, and he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Believe it or not, I’m not a monster, Bryn. I asked Callum to lock him up, because Callum issued an edict that no one was to stop us from leaving. Based on the way that boy stood guard over you while you were unconscious, flashing from one form to another, daring us to move him from your side, I inferred that he might not be able to keep himself in check when we left, and that you might not want him to face the kind of justice that had been visited upon you.”
For a single second, that took the wind out of my sails. “Did you have them lock Casey up, too?” I sneered, once I’d recovered.
“As a matter of fact,” Ali replied, her grip on the wheel tightening, “I did.”
Radio. On. Only this time, it was Ali’s decision, not mine, and she turned down the volume and changed the station. In the backseat, Katie closed her eyes again, and for the next hundred miles, the four of us drove in near-silence, the gentle warble of country music the only sound in the car.
Ali drove straight through the night. At some point, I fell asleep, and in my dreams, Chase came to me in wolf form. His fur was black, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes were lighter even than their human counterparts: two orbs of ice blue in a sea of darkness. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t make a sound. The two of us just sprawled out on the ground about a foot apart. I could feel his warm breath on my face, and after an eternity of the two of us staring at each other, I buried my hands in his fur, which should have been coarse, but felt silky soft in my hands. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, and I could feel my heart beating in unison with his.
“This doesn’t mean we’re mates,” I told him.
He opened his mouth very wide in a mischievous, wolfy yawn.
“Women’s liberation and all that,” I continued, catching his yawn and trying to push it down. “No Mark. No lifetime commitment. No ‘property of’ signs. We just have a bond, that’s all.”
His tail beat quietly against the dirt beneath us, and a smile worked its way onto my own lips.
“Loser,” I said, playing my fingertips over his rib cage, oddly compelled to scratch his belly.
In response to my insult, Chase bared his teeth in mock threat, but scooted closer toward me, and after a long moment, I laid my head on his neck, and the two of us—girl and wolf—fell asleep, into a dream within a dream.
I see you.
Words dripped, sing-sung, from a crooked mouth. No face. No body. Just a mouth—bones cracking, jaw breaking.
I see you.
Sharp smile, fanged and smeared with red.
I recognized the voice. I recognized the blood, but this wasn’t my nightmare. It was Chase’s.
Like a strobe light, images flashed in rapid fire in front of me. A man: brown eyes, open face, never aged past thirty. Red teeth. Gray wolf, white star. Jaws snapping.
So much blood.
I looked for Chase, called to him, but I couldn’t find him. I was too far away.
Wolf. Fight.
Not my dream. Not my instinct. Not my haze, but the whole world went blood-red nonetheless, almost purple. Rotted. Congealed.
Chase. I had to find Chase.
I could feel his eyes opening. Lightning in his stomach, jaw aching as he Shifted back to human form.
Look
You’re mine, said the mouth with the wolf attached. I made you. You belong to me.
And that was what did it, because Chase didn’t belong to blood and panic. Didn’t belong to a Rabid rotting from the inside out. He didn’t even belong to Callum, steady and sure.
He belonged to me.
Light surged all around us in a starburst, halfway between the moment of detonation for an atomic bomb and the skyline on the Fourth of July.
Warm.
Safe.
Mine.
And just like that, Chase and I were back on a bed of wet leaves and grass, the smell of dirt and autumn reminding me that this was a dream. Only a dream.
In human form, Chase curled beside me, his forehead damp with sweat, and I ran my fingers through his matted hair, as naturally as I had his wolf fur. I folded my body against his, keeping watch until his breathing slowed, and mine slowed, and together, we faded into sweet, blissful nothing.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
My first instinct when I heard Ali’s words was to growl, but as the real world settled back into place and the protective instinct my dream had awakened slipped from me, I remembered two things. First, I wasn’t actually a werewolf and therefore didn’t have the possessive-protective gene dictating my every move, and second, I wasn’t talking to Ali at the moment. Feeling awkward in my own body, I rubbed the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and instead of growling, settled for a pointed glare.
Ali ignored me. She just unbuckled her seat belt and climbed out of the car, shutting the door on me and my mood. While I was still trying to get over the insult, she opened the back door on the driver’s side and unhooked Katie from her car seat.
“I take it we’re stopping?” I asked.
“We’re here,” Ali corrected me. “You slept like the dead and missed breakfast. I’m sure someone can rustle you up some food if you’re hungry.”
Settling Katie on one hip, Ali gestured toward the other car seat. “You mind?” she asked.
I wanted to say yes, but the look on Alex’s face—scrunched up and lopsided—kept me from being difficult on principle. I unbuckled my seat belt, opened the door, and slid out of the car. I was halfway through liberating Alex when my mind caught up with my body enough to wonder where here was.
The air was crisp and cool for early summer and smelled like snow in my nose, even though there wasn’t a hint of white on the stretch of grass under my feet. Hoisting Alex into my arms, I turned and looked away from the car, and the way the earth stretched out before me—green and flat and untouched—threw me back.
Turning slowly, I took in the 360 view. There was a large, wooden building up ahead of us—a restaurant, or maybe an inn—and from the distance, I could see a crooked sign hanging over a small porch but couldn’t make out the words. Other, smaller buildings dotted the horizon, looking like they’d been carved from the land itself. There were scattered trees, and in the distance, I could see a denser forest and a hint of blue. Water. Possibly a lake.
And that was the exact second I realized where we were—and who lived in Montana.
Sure enough, as Ali and I moved toward the largest building, the sign came more clearly into view and a man—tall, with a scruffy beard and a deceptively unassuming air—came out onto the porch.
“The Wayfarer,” I said, reading the sign.
“Did I not mention that this was where we were coming?” Ali asked.
“No. You neglected that detail.”
“Oh, right. Because we weren’t talking.”
Sometimes, Ali could be just as much of a brat as I was—the downfall of having a guardian barely twice my age.
“Ali,” the man on the porch greeted her.
“Mitch,” she returned, her tone more or less identical to his—mild, warm, and unsurprised.
“These your little ones?” Mitch asked, his eyes going to the twins.
Ali nodded. “Kaitlin and Alexander. They’re almost four months.”
“Little girl likes her wolf,” Mitch said with a smile. “She’s growing faster than her brother.”
Ali blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes, and Katie, as if she knew exactly what the adults were talking about, arched her back, her pupils dilating.
“Oh, no, little missy,” Ali said. “You wait until Mama’s got you out of these clothes and—”
Katie’s body trembled with the pre-Change, and Mitch came to Ali’s rescue.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll take her.”
Katie went to him willingly, and for a moment, it was like she’d forgotten about changing altogether, which was a minor miracle that wouldn’t last. Since the day she was born, Katie had never been this long in human form, and now—with the wilderness spread out before us—her urge to Shift would win out, without question or doubt. It was only a matter of time.
“Bryn,” Mitch greeted me. He didn’t look twice at my battered face. He didn’t seem surprised that we were here.
He knew.
I felt like I was back at the Crescent in front of the pack, stripping down my mental defenses, letting them in just so they could beat me later.
Screw that.
What had happened was no one’s business but mine.
“Hey, Mr. Mitchell,” I said.
“Mitch,” the man corrected gruffly, but he had to have known it was useless. Something about him always kept me from calling him by his preferred name. Maybe it was the fact that though he was a part of our pack, he visited the stronghold rarely.
Or maybe it was because he was Lake’s dad.
“Is Lake …?”
“She’s out back,” Mitch said, his voice a low, rumbling hum. “No idea what she’s doing. Pretty sure I don’t wanna know, but I suspect she wouldn’t mind some company.” Mitch paused, for a fraction of a second. “Don’t let her shoot you,” he grunted.
With Lake, chances were that was pretty good advice. Maybe she would loan me a gun. At the moment, I kind of felt like doing some shooting myself.
“Should I cut through?” I asked, gesturing to the door of the Wayfarer.
“If your mother don’t mind you taking off before you four are settled—”
“It’s fine,” Ali said. At this point, she was probably glad to be rid of me.
“Go on, then,” Mitch said, jerking his head toward the door. “Git.”
I got.
The restaurant was nearly empty. There were a couple of people sitting in a corner booth, and there was a towheaded woman in her mid-thirties or so behind the bar, wiping down the counter. When I walked in, she leaned forward on both elbows, with a look on her face that told me that she was probably the kind of bartender that people poured their hearts out to.
I wasn’t buying.
The bartender caught me staring at her, and I turned my head away, averting my eyes and slumping my shoulders. The reaction was completely reflexive, but foreign, and I found myself wondering when I’d become a good little pack girl who averted her gaze and didn’t cause trouble, and—for that matter—when I’d started submitting to humans, even as I silently wished they’d take their prying eyes and quiet sympathy elsewhere.
I had to get out of there.
The back door of the Wayfarer was only about twenty feet away from the front, but I found that despite all efforts to the contrary, I couldn’t walk toward it quickly. I’d heard so much about this place over the years. I knew which boards in the floor I could remove to find packets of gum and stashes of childhood treasures, I knew that the whiskey behind the counter was sometimes watered down because a certain someone occasionally snuck a glass and replaced it with water, and I knew that the pool table leaned slightly to the right—a fact that helped if you were the type to hustle the clientele.
By the time I made it to the back door, I felt like I’d been inside forever. The need to get out and away and to be by myself was overpowering, but the moment I stepped outside, the fresh air hi
Sora’s blank face. Ribs popping. Flying backward.
I physically shook the memory from my head. Lake wasn’t Sora. Sora wasn’t the Rabid. Nobody was going to shoot me here.
“Too scared to face me up close?” I called, forcing the knot of anxiety from my chest. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft, Lake.”
Lake snorted and bared her teeth in a wicked grin, and then she was off the fence, shotgun on the ground, running toward me. I started running toward her, too, but barely got three steps before she crashed into me and tackled me to the ground.
“Hey, bruised ribs here,” I said.
“Oh, you yellow-bellied crybaby,” Lake replied. “Did poor wittle Bwyn fall and go boom again?”
“For the last time, I didn’t fall out of that tree—you pushed me.”
“Snitch,” she said amiably.
“Mutt,” I replied, and then I threw myself at and into her, hugging her hard.
Besides Katie, Lake was the only female born in Callum’s territory in the past hundred years. Maybe longer, depending on how old Sora was. Lake and her dad didn’t come to our neck of the woods very often, and for whatever reason, Callum never forced their hand, so growing up, Lake and I had developed a relationship that I suspect is similar to what happens to humans who go to summer camp. When we were together, we were inseparable. From sunup to sundown, if you found one of us, you found the other. Devon was my best friend, but when Lake was in town, our duo became an easy trio: the human, the purebred, and the female Were, freaks all.
Lake, ever unaware of her own strength, squeezed too hard as she returned my hug, but despite the hug-with-a-vengeance, my ribs didn’t so much as twinge, and I took that as an omen that maybe coming here hadn’t been a mistake on Ali’s part. Maybe I just needed time to regroup.