Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The incessant plea—Out, Out, Out—gave me an idea.
Are your senses better in wolf form? I asked Chase silently.
His response told me that he wasn’t sure of the answer. In wolf form, Chase always had trouble thinking. Trouble remembering.
Shift anyway? I asked him. I might be able to think for both of us.
Yes, the wolf inside of Chase said. Yes!
Chase shuddered. The muscles in his neck relaxed. His head rolled to the side, and then pain, white-hot and bone-shattering, enveloped his body.
I felt it. I welcomed it. And as Chase’s human form gave way, a rush of power washed over the pain, turning agony to ecstasy and back again.
Run. As a wolf, Chase wanted to run. It would have been so easy to lose myself to the same overwhelming need, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. In wolf form, Our senses were doubled, and as We padded away from Callum’s house on all fours, the alphas finally began talking. We could hear them, but they couldn’t hear Us.
Wolf didn’t want to listen. Wolf wanted to run.
No. Unlike Chase, whose conscious thoughts were scrambled and wordless post-Change, I was still me. I could still remember why We’d Shifted, and I could still make out the meaning in the words the Senate was saying, even if I could only decipher about one in every three.
“… Change … powerful.”
“… miscarriage …”
“… five in the entire country! Five!”
Five what? Five Rabids? I hoped to God that wasn’t true.
“Two in your territory, Callum.” Shay’s voice traveled better than the other alphas’. He talked more loudly, putting more power into his voice, because of all of them, he was the youngest and he had the most to prove. Wolf understood this better than I did, and I pulled my understanding of the situation from instincts that weren’t mine.
“Your numbers are growing. Two babies, one new wolf. Stone River is already the largest pack.”
Wolf knew what this meant, his innate grasp of the intricacies of Were politics putting mine to shame. More babies, Wolf said, meant more wolves. More wolves meant a bigger pack. A stronger pack.
A stronger alpha.
I got the message loud and clear: in the wild, math was simple. The strongest alpha was only as strong as the force of his pack. And right now, Stone River was the biggest pack.
Alpha. One alpha. One pack.
Wolf growled the words, and I absorbed them. To werewolves, dominance was everything. The most dominant wolf had all of the power. The strongest wolf was meant to dominate them all.
Unite the packs. Unite the power.
That was the siren’s call that set each and every alpha on edge when the Senate was called. They needed to challenge each other. One of them needed to dominate, the others needed to submit. Wolf’s instincts gave way to my explicit knowledge of the situation, and I did the math.
Callum had the biggest pack. Callum had a knack for seeing the future. I would have bet my life that Callum was older and stronger and more everything than any other person in that room.
Callum was the biggest threat, and the fact that his pack was growing faster than the others did nothing to assuage the others’ fears, their instinctual suspicions that if Callum had wanted to, he could have been their alpha, too. The realization startled me, but it didn’t surprise me. It took me off guard, but it made perfect sense. Callum was experienced. He was powerful. He was smart.
He was Callum.
“Five births, and two of them yours.” Shay again. I hated him, but appreciated his enunciation, because the rest of the alphas’ voices blended together in a blur.
“… no births …”
“Only one …”
The other alphas didn’t like the idea of Callum’s pack growing while theirs shrank. They had to have known, the way Wolf did just being in the room with them, that if Callum tired of democracy, the entire North American continent could be his.
“… Rabid …”
At that word, Chase’s wolf ears literally perked up. Even with his mind jumbled, he recognized it.
This was why we were here. Why we were listening.
“Answer … not that simple …”
“—prerogative—”
I could only catch bits and pieces of words, but even that shocked me because they weren’t the words I’d expected to hear. The alphas should have been talking about strategies for hunting the Rabid. They should have been sharing what they knew of his potential location. They shouldn’t have been saying …
“… unless … we need …”
“… turn … blind eye—”
Blind eye? Blind eye? They couldn’t have just said those words in a discussion about a rabid wolf. They couldn’t have. The men in this room were a twig’s snap away from attacking each other in one giant dominance struggle. This Rabid had killed in their territories. His very existence was a challenge, and alphas didn’t abide challenges.
Alphas were strong. They kept their packs safe. They eliminated threats.
“—in exchange … desirable …”
“So we barter with murderers now?” Callum’s voice carried, for the opposite reason as Shay’s. He had nothing to prove. It was power, not volume, that carried his words to my ears, and Wolf crouched, belly brushing the ground at the sound of the tone.
Callum wasn’t Chase’s alpha the way he used to be. But even now, that tone, that power—
There was an instinct to obey. To fold. To give in to the power of his words.
But Shay didn’t. “Is that your final word on the matter, Callum?”
“It is.”
For a moment there was silence, and then Shay spoke up again. “And what are you going to do about it?”
Nobody spoke to Callum like that. Not the other alphas. Not his own wolves. Not even me … most of the time anyway.
Shay wasn’t challenging Callum. Not exactly. He was daring Callum to challenge the rest of them. To force his will on them. To prove he could.
To do it.
One pack. One alpha.
“Are we a democracy or aren’t we?” Shay threw down the gauntlet. “Do we vote or do you decide?”
Vote on what? Decide what? To barter? To turn a blind eye?
Challenge them, I screamed silently at Callum. Do it. Take them. Take it all.
He could have. Every part of me, every memory, every instinct I had said that Callum could stop this. He could make them understand.
He could make them submit.
But he didn’t. “We’re a democracy,” Callum said, his tone never changing, his surety never called into question.
Wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong. Wolves weren’t meant for democracy. Werewolves weren’t meant to vote. Callum was safe. Callum was strong. Callum should have done something.
He didn’t.
“All in favor?”
In favor of what? I couldn’t hear the vote go down, didn’t hear anyone’s answer but Callum’s, but I knew based on the tone of his voice that it must have been in the minority, that the others were voting to do the unthinkable.
I tried to wrap my mind around it but couldn’t. The Senate wasn’t going to hunt the Rabid. They were going to make him a deal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“NO!” I SAT UP IN BED, THE SCREAM TEARING ITS WAY out of my throat. On the other side of our bond, Chase was going wild, his wolf giving in to bloodlust, hunting. Rabbits. Deer.
Chase needed to kill something.
I could relate. My own fingernails dug into my pillow, and I came dangerously close to tearing it apart. As I extracted myself from Chase’s mind, I was hit with two pangs of withdrawal. One was his. The other was mine, and they mirrored each other so perfectly that at any other time, I would have turned the feelings over and over in my head, remembering the feeling of his skin and being inside it and hurting in sync with his loss.
With the way that we’d both just been betrayed. Again.
Callum could have fought the othe
I wasn’t worth it.
“Bryn!” Ali came rushing into the room, a knife in her hand. The image seemed wrong. Ali wasn’t a fighter, and I could take care of myself.
I was the one Callum had trained to fight, not her.
“Are you okay?” Ali’s eyes were wild, and for the first time, I felt her pack-bond brushing against what was left of mine.
Ali was Pack, and I’d scared her to death.
“I’m fine,” I said, thankful that she didn’t have a Were’s ability to smell the truth. “Bad dream.”
Except it wasn’t a dream. It was real. The Rabid was alive, and if the Senate had their way, he wouldn’t be experiencing a shift in condition anytime soon. And Callum had just stood there and let it happen in the name of democracy.
Screw democracy. And screw Callum, too.
Ali sat beside me on the bed. “It must have been some dream,” she said, stroking my hair back from my eyes.
I reminded myself that Ali was family. Ali would never have betrayed me like this. But Ali wasn’t a fighter, and she wouldn’t understand that I had to fight. That if the Senate wasn’t going to kill the Rabid, I was.
She’d worry, and she’d yell, and she’d lock me in my room until I turned thirty. And while I sat around doing nothing, other people would die.
“It was a really bad dream,” I told Ali, forcing the tremors out of my voice. “But on the bright side, I don’t think I have a fever anymore.”
“You never had a fever,” Ali replied. The tone in her voice reminded me that Ali wasn’t stupid, and that oatmeal or no oatmeal, there was a good chance my “illness” hadn’t fooled her as well as I’d thought. “You needed to be alone. I get that.”
I felt like maybe she did understand, even though her actual words reinforced the fact that she had no idea that this had nothing to do with me struggling to deal with the events of the last few days and everything to do with the events of the last few minutes. It wasn’t Ali’s fault that I’d neglected to mention that Chase and I could hop in and out of each other’s heads at will. There would be time to feel guilty about that little omission later. Right now, I had other things to hide.
Like the fact that the dull roar in my gut—telling me to hunt, to kill, to protect—had gone nuclear.
On the other side of our bond, I felt Chase’s approval, felt him tear into an animal’s throat with a ferocity that should have scared me, but didn’t.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ali asked, doing a 180 from the moment before and laying a hand on my cheek. “You actually do feel a little warm, and you look … strange.”
“Thanks a lot,” I replied. It wasn’t like I could say, Well, the werewolf who shares my brain just killed a deer, and the two of us are planning on hunting down the Big Bad Wolf like the woodsman of yore.
Hmmmm …, I thought, the mind bunnies multiplying. Woodsman. Ax. Silver ax.
If I was going to hunt a Rabid, I needed weapons, and I needed to figure out where exactly the Rabid was. I’d counted on eavesdropping to tell me the latter, but things hadn’t worked out that way. I’d have to figure it out myself. As for weapons …
“I think I’m going to go to the restaurant and harass Lake,” I told Ali. “She’s waiting tables this afternoon, and I’d kind of like to see her in action.”
I didn’t mention that the action I most wanted to see Lake enact was the way she’d respond when I asked her if she had any weapons other than a shotgun. If she didn’t, she’d know where to find them and she’d take disturbing joy in doing so. I’d be Santa Claus, just for asking.
And while Lake requisitioned supplies, I’d track our Rabid. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I’d do it, the same way I knew that Ali wouldn’t object to me going to talk to Lake.
“She doing okay?” Ali asked, transferring her maternal instincts from me to Lake.
“She’ll be fine until the alphas come back through, and then she’ll be fine again after that.”
If I could figure out where our prey was hiding, Lake wouldn’t have to stay inside when the alphas came back through Montana. We’d be well on our way to No-Man’s-Land by then.
The Wayfarer was nearly empty when I slid into a corner booth. Lake, notepad in hand, slid in across from me.
“Aren’t you supposed to be taking my order?” I asked.
“Bite me. And then you can tell me what’s wrong.” She paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be with …?”
She gestured elaborately, and I filled in the blank. Lake had known my plan for this morning. I’d promised to report back, and here I was.
“Been there. Done that. Didn’t go so well.”
Lake threw her notepad to the side, summarily ignoring the three other occupied tables in the restaurant. “Didn’t go so well as in you didn’t see anything, or didn’t go so well as in you didn’t like what you saw?”
“More like heard,” I corrected her. “But the second one.”
“The Rabid escaped again?” Lake guessed. “They have no idea where he is?”
“Oh, no,” I replied, my voice forcefully cheerful, because it was the only way I could keep from yelling. “Nothing like that. Apparently, he has something the alphas want, so they’re not going to hunt him. They voted.”
“Voted?” Lake asked incredulously. Clearly, she couldn’t imagine Callum voting on anything, not when his word was, in her experience, pretty much law.
“Callum was in the minority. They outvoted him. Nothing he could do.”
Lies, lies, lies. He could have done something. If he’d wanted to.
“Sucks,” Lake opined. “So when are we leaving?”
She didn’t even have to ask what I intended to do now. She knew, and she was with me, the same way Chase was. Two teenage werewolves and one human girl against an enemy the pack had chosen not to cross.
This Rabid was going down if it killed me. I tried not to think about the fact that it probably would.
“We leave as soon as I figure out where we’re going,” I said, concentrating on what needed to be done, right here, right now. “In the meantime, can you rustle up some …?” I didn’t want to say the word weapons out loud, but Lake took my meaning.
“Supplies?” she asked, her eyes sparkling, but hard. “I might know where we could get some. Just let me tell Keely I’m out of here.”
I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Lake “telling” Keely anything—not when I knew that it was disturbingly easy to tell Keely way too much—but Lake couldn’t exactly take off without explanation. Not if we wanted to keep Ali and Mitch in the dark.
“Be right back,” Lake told me, heading for the bar.
“Excuse me,” a man—human—at a nearby table called. “Could I get a refill on my—?”
“Nope.” Lake didn’t even look for him as she zeroed in on Keely. I hung back, figuring that the less I spoke to the World’s Best Listener, the better.
For her part, Keely took one look at Lake and frowned. “Whatever it is, the answer is no.”
“But you don’t even know what the question is,” Lake said.
“I don’t have to. I know that look. That look is trouble.”
Lake wheedled. “I just need to cut out early today. Bryn needs my help.”
Keely blew a wisp of hair out of her face. “Fine, but you breathe a word to your daddy about me letting you out of here without a cross-examination, and you and I are going to have words. Clear?”
Lake smiled in response, and I added Keely to the list of people, including Ali and Mitch, who’d be ready to kill us the moment they figured out where we’d gone.
Five minutes later, Lake and I were outside and on our own.
“Cabin twelve,” Lake said.
“What?”
“Cabin twelve. That’s w
I didn’t ask how Lake knew this, and I didn’t question the fact that Mr. Mitchell had an entire cabin full of weapons. Under normal circumstances, I would have, because—Lake’s fondness for shotguns aside—werewolves didn’t need weapons. They were weapons. But thinking back to the look on Mitch’s face when he’d told me, all calmlike, that male werewolves could get funny around females, I wasn’t surprised.
Against humans, werewolves didn’t need weapons. Against other werewolves, being armed to the hilt might come in handy, at least in human form.
“Okay,” I said. “So you’ll take care of the weapons situation. Now we need to know where we’re going and we need a way to get there.”
I kept coming up with small problems, like transportation, because no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind, I couldn’t come up with a solution to the bigger one: we didn’t know where the Rabid was. We’d have only a few hours’ head start once we left here, before Ali and Mitch figured out that we’d gone. We couldn’t afford to wander around aimlessly. We couldn’t act on some unformed hunch.
We had to be sure.
“Transportation is easy,” Lake said when I brought up the issue. “My dad got a new car, but he hasn’t gotten rid of his truck yet. We’ll take that.”
“Can you drive?” I asked. I wasn’t sixteen yet, and though I’d managed fine with all stolen motorcycles I’d come in contact with, I wasn’t sure I could handle a stick shift.
“Bryn, I live in the country in the middle of nowhere. The school’s thirty miles away. My daddy’s had me driving since I was twelve.”
I followed her words enough to know that transportation wouldn’t be a problem, but beyond that, all I could think about was the Rabid.
Madison.
“You look like you have an idea,” Lake said.
“I might,” I replied. Everything we’d discovered about the Rabid so far, we’d discovered because the last time he’d come after Chase’s dreams, Chase and I had seen a glimpse into his mind. Marks, bonds, connections—they went both ways. The only reason the Rabid stalked Chase’s dreams was because Chase was blocking him when he was awake.