Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
General rule of thumb: except for Devon, the rest of our age-mates usually gave me a fairly wide berth. One seemingly mild glance from Callum was all it took to warn them away from thinking I was future mate material, and unless werewolves were on the lookout for a breeding partner, most of them didn’t have any use for humans. There were at most a dozen of us human-types living in the woods at any given time, and besides me, every single one was mated to one of the pack’s males. There were more human females, lots of them, buried in unmarked graves: the ones who hadn’t survived taking on a bond with the pack during the mating process, the ones who’d died in childbirth, the ones who’d lived to a ripe old age while their werewolf mates stayed young.
No, thank you.
If Callum hadn’t scared off any and all of my would-be suitors, I would have done the job myself.
“You three can go now,” I said, trying to put a hint of Callum—understated authority and uncompromising power—in my voice.
Not one of them moved.
Since I obviously wasn’t good at commanding their fear and respect, I tried to appeal to their rationality. “I’m fine. I’m safe. The outside threat just went poof.” Unfortunately, this seemed to be falling on completely deaf ears. Jeff was gone, and if anyone had a claim to me, it was Devon, but our age-mates just stood there, flanking my position like the threat hadn’t abated.
If I’d opened up my bond, I might have been able to figure out why, but I also would have been devoured whole by the power that flowed through the entire pack. I was connected to each of them through Callum’s Mark, but just living with the pack had me treading water for every breath of independence I managed to take.
All of which meant that I had to rely on more subtle methods of finding out the things that I needed to know.
“Jeff’s gone, and you’re all acting like the threat is still here,” I said. “Would I be correct in guessing that means that there is an outside threat? And would this be the same outside threat that has Callum insisting I be inside every day by dark?”
Devon groaned. The other three just exchanged looks. I’d promised Ali I wouldn’t push things, and that was the only reason I wasn’t out scouring our territory for the threat, slipping out my bedroom window at night to get a good look at whatever it was that came out with the moon—besides the obvious, of course. Weres could Shift anyplace, anytime, but it was harder for them to stay human at nighttime, especially during that time of the month.
But because I was Pack, I was safe. Even when they Shifted. Even when the moon was full.
Or so I’d been told, over and over again, for as long as I could remember.
“The threat isn’t internal.” As the words left my mouth, I transitioned from trying to convince myself to treating the entire situation as a giant logic puzzle. “And it’s probably not a human.” That much went without saying; no mere human could put an entire werewolf pack on high alert. “Whatever is putting the growl in your growlers isn’t a foreign wolf, either, because it wouldn’t take the lot of you more than an hour to send him back to his own alpha, tail between his legs. Unless, of course, he was a lone wolf, in which case Callum would take care of it himself.”
Weres were pack animals, and nine times out of ten, loners were loners for a reason. Without psychic bonds to others of their kind, werewolves had a tendency to go Rabid. Give in to the desire to hunt. Hunt more than rabbits or deer. Given my history, it made perfect sense that the pack wouldn’t want me to know if a wolf on our lands was on the verge of madness, but if that was the case, the whole thing would have been over and done with in seconds.
Werewolves policed their own, and a wolf that hunted humans was as good as dead.
“No, it has to be something bigger than that,” I mused. “Something that you all see as a threat but that Callum won’t let you eliminate. Something that makes you want to protect me, even though I don’t need your protection.”
All four of them bristled at that one—even Dev. He just got over it quicker.
“Gentlemen, I think I’ve got this from here,” he said, and with a wave of one manicured hand and a glint of steel in his eyes, he sent our age-mates on their way before I could trick them into revealing anything I didn’t already know.
“You did that on purpose,” I told him.
Devon, his posture and body language still leaking dominance, snorted. “Darn tootin’. If you poke enough angry bears with sticks, someday you’re going to get burned, sweetheart.”
I was tempted to mock him for mixing his metaphors, but I didn’t. In normal circumstances, Devon would have been on my side, hunting up answers and pushing the limits of my promise to Ali. The fact that he wasn’t just made me want to know more.
“Ah, right on time,” Devon said.
I realized that Callum was standing between us. He had a way of appearing out of nowhere, silent and deadly, and the carefully neutral expression on his face made me reconsider the wisdom of baiting him in the first place.
“I take it you’re here about algebra?” I asked him. Callum had a pesky habit of knowing what I was going to do before I did it, and there wasn’t a thing that went down in his territory that escaped his notice.
“A moment, please, Devon?” Callum asked, his tone perfectly pleasant. Devon nodded, his eyes cast downward as he stepped aside. The alpha’s effect on his wolves was immediate and overpowering.
Bless my human immunity.
“Bryn.”
That wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected him to yell-without-yelling. To narrow his eyes at me. To grab my chin in his hand and force me to meet his most uncompromising gaze.
He didn’t. Instead, all he said was my name. My stomach twisted sharply. Something was wrong.
“Ali?”
“She’s fine now. There were some complications. She’s on bed rest.”
The pack had its own doctor, a werewolf who’d been trained in the 1800s but did his best to keep up with modern medicine of both the human and veterinary varieties. In the past two centuries, he’d overseen more than his fair share of births, and it stood to reason that he knew what he was talking about. Besides, it wasn’t like Ali could go to a normal hospital, not when her baby was anything but.
Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—
I tried not to think about the bad thing. I tried not to think about women, just like Ali, who hadn’t survived. I tried not to picture myself hiding under the sink, terrified and alone, knowing there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop death when it came knocking on my door.
Callum brushed my hair out of my face, forcing my mind to the present. “She’ll be fine, Bryn.” He paused, and my Mark hummed in a way that made me wonder if his stomach was twisting, too. “I promise you, Ali will be fine.”
Werewolves didn’t make promises lightly. Callum, as alpha, was bound by his word. I really wanted to believe him, but there was no way he could know for sure. Even Callum wasn’t psychic.
His lips curved upward, ever so slightly—half warning, half smile. “I also promise, little Bronwyn, that for the next three weeks until the baby is born, you won’t so much as sneeze out of turn. You’ll go to school. You’ll go home. You can make as many paper fire hydrants as you want, but you’ll stop pushing it.”
I had a feeling that what he really meant was that I’d stop pushing him. Stop asking questions. Stop thinking about the scent of danger in the air, the indescribable buzzing that told me that something in our pack was off.
“Ali will be fine, and you’ll be on your best behavior.” The tone in Callum’s voice sounded more like prophecy than an order, and I pushed down the urge to challenge him. Part of me wanted to, but the other part couldn’t stop thinking about Ali.
You’ll be on your best behavior, and Ali will be fine.
I inverted the order of Callum’s words and silently made Fate a deal. I would do whatever Callum said, would do whatever anyone said, and in return, karma, the universe, whatever would see to it that A
Fair was fair. A bargain was a bargain—and at this point, all there was left to do was wait.
CHAPTER FOUR
“SHE’S OKAY. SHE’S OKAY. SHE’S GOT TO BE OKAY.” I turned on my heels and started walking back down the hallway, continuing my litany. “She’s got to be okay, right, Lance?”
Devon’s father—all 6′6″ of him—was my current bodyguard and the least talkative werewolf I knew, so it wasn’t exactly a shocker when he didn’t respond. Only this time, I wasn’t sure whether it was because he wasn’t exactly social in his human form, or because he didn’t know what to say. Bryn babysitting duty encompassed many things, but it usually didn’t involve me teetering on the edge of hysteria and reaching out to the closest Slab of Werewolf to pull me back.
“Ali’s going to be fine.” I addressed my words to Lance’s mammoth chest, unwilling to look him in the eye. “She’s strong. She’s never backed down from a fight.” Speaking hurt my throat, which tightened as I tried to breathe. “Not everyone dies,” I said more softly. “She’s going to be okay, right, Lance?”
“Right,” Lance said, suddenly discovering his voice. I glanced up at him, and his strong, Nordic features shuddered as he attempted something that resembled a smile the way that a great white shark resembles a goldfish.
That, more than anything, freaked me out. Ali was less than twelve feet away, behind closed doors with the pack’s doctor, an hour into a labor that was more likely to kill her than not. My entire body was shaking, and no matter what I said, the ghosts dancing in the corners of my mind whispered that everyone did die. Maybe not in labor, but when it came to me and mothers, dying was the status quo.
And now, Lance was actually speaking to me and smiling, something he hadn’t done in the entire course of my childhood, let alone the month he’d been part of my security team.
This could not possibly be a good sign. If he’d thought I was worrying over nothing, he wouldn’t have said a word.
“I’m going to throw up,” I said, turning again, this time to run for the bathroom. I slammed the door behind me and lunged for the toilet, but nothing happened. I was so scared, I couldn’t even throw up. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t just wait in our house, listening to Ali scream but barred from being in there with her. I couldn’t pace up and down the halls, stopping only when someone came to tell me that it was over, one way or another.
If Lance was talking to me, that meant that he was far enough off his game that he might not catch me in the act of leaving. Ali let out another bone-crunching cry of pain, and I closed my eyes, willing myself not to hear her screams. Forcing myself to pay attention only to the goal of escaping, I crept toward the window, letting the inhuman noises ripping their way out of Ali’s battered throat cover the sound of my steps. I lowered my body out the window and climbed down the side of the house. If I hadn’t been in such good shape, thanks to the daily workout regime I’d been put through every morning since I was six, I probably couldn’t have managed to make it to the ground without breaking both my legs, but between my training and my desperation to get away, it was a snap.
I hit the ground running and didn’t stop. As a matter of reflex, I covered my tracks, running in patterns designed to make tracking me difficult. There were several streams in the woods, as well as the disturbingly named Dead Man’s Creek, and I made a point of crossing all of them. Whenever I saw a second pair of tracks, I ran along them, and I loosed my emergency bag of cayenne pepper (which I kept on my person at all times) in an area where I knew any self-respecting tracker would take a great big whiff.
If that didn’t throw Lance off, nothing would. Everyone else would be too concerned with Ali to worry about me.
I’d been instinctively covering my tracks for several minutes before I realized where I was going and why. For the past few weeks, I’d been the poster girl for good behavior. I’d kept up my end of the bargain with fate, and now it was the universe’s turn to pay up. The way I saw it, I’d promised Ali I’d leave the pack’s secret alone until the baby was born and she was in the clear. Now, Ali was in labor, and I needed a distraction.
Close enough.
As part of my poster-child act, I hadn’t let myself actively think about the origin of the pack’s unrest, and I hadn’t formulated a master plan, but on a subconscious level, I think I’d always known where to go to find the answers. There weren’t foreign wolves on our land. A human hadn’t discovered our secret. There was a threat. An outside threat that couldn’t be dispelled with tooth and claw. Whatever the answer to this puzzle was, my best chance of finding it was about a mile away, deep in the heart of the woods, sitting directly on top of the highest point of elevation in the valley.
Callum’s house.
And for once, he wouldn’t be there, and he wouldn’t know that I had been until after I left. Then he’d kill me, but given the circumstances, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would care.
I knew the way there by heart, even though I rarely found myself on Callum’s doorstep. He preferred to come to me in my studio or at Ali’s house. Callum’s home was reserved for pack business. We all met there, twice a year: the wolves and their wives and Ali and me. It was a different sort of meeting than the pack’s ceremonial runnings, where the Weres shed their human skin and let their wolves come out to play. Those meetings I avoided like the plague, but the ones that took place at Callum’s house required my attendance. There was always an artifice of bureaucracy to them, like anyone in a room full of Weres could forget, even for a second, that our lives weren’t democratic in the least. My inclusion—and Ali’s, before she’d married Casey—marked me as unique in the werewolf world. Humans, unless claimed and Marked as a wolf’s mate, were never invited to Callum’s house. They were never initiated into the pack. They certainly weren’t adopted using a ceremony meant for pups whose mothers had died in childbirth.
They weren’t Marked by an alpha at the ripe old age of four.
Long story short, the way to Callum’s place, the inner sanctum of our werewolf community, wasn’t the kind of thing a girl just forgot, and I made it there in record time. Not being a complete idiot, I paused as I got close, standing absolutely still and listening for several minutes. My hearing was good for a human, my senses as developed as they could be given my species, and I put every ounce of that to use, trying to determine whether or not anyone was guarding Callum’s house. I doubted he would have anticipated my coming here, but if there were answers to be found inside, I might not be the only reason to guard them.
I closed my eyes. Concentrating on one sense at a time helped my accuracy. There was definitely someone inside, probably in the living room. And there, I thought, another one in the kitchen. There was no telling about the basement or the second floor. I opened my eyes, edged closer and closer until I was very near the house, and looked. And then, of course, I was promptly caught, because as quiet as I was, and as sneaky as I was, the people inside were werewolves, and any attempt at pitting my stealth against their stealth had roughly the same chance of success I would have enjoyed in challenging them to a wrestling match.
My first clue that things had gone awry was the person in the living room turning to look directly at me, her face tightening into a pointed glare. My second was the fact that the person I’d heard in the kitchen was now outside and stalking toward me, beefy fists clenched.
My third clue was a very, very audible growl.
“What are you doing here?” Marcus spat, grabbing me by the shoulder and turning me to face him in a way that hurt but wouldn’t leave a bruise. He’d learned the hard way not to leave any marks, and he’d never learn more than that. I was Callum’s, more connected to him than his most loyal soldiers, and for as long as I lived, Marcus would hate me for that. Any injury—physical or mental—that he thought he could get away with inflicting on me, he would.
It hadn’t taken very long on my end for the feeling to become mutual.
“I ask
From Marcus, girl was an insult, and a large part of the reason that he hated me as much as he did. If the alpha had adopted anyone, chosen to teach anyone, that person should have been a werewolf, and he should have been male.
“C-C-C-Callum,” I said, forcing myself to stutter as a means of stalling for the time necessary to think up a truth that wouldn’t incriminate me.
“Callum?” Marcus said. “Is he hurt?”
As much as I hated Marcus, I couldn’t deny his loyalty. He would have died for Callum.
“Bryn, is Callum hurt?”
I could count on one hand the number of times Marcus had called me by any of my given names, let alone my preferred one. I remembered then how awful I’d looked in the bathroom mirror back at home. Each of Ali’s screams had carved itself onto my face: my eyes were bloodshot, my lips torn from biting down, and the shadows under my eyes extended down past my cheekbones. Every muscle in my body was tuned to anguish. And Marcus, who hated Ali nearly as much as he hated me, probably couldn’t fathom the fact that I could be this worried about her. The only person Marcus cared enough to worry about was Callum, and he was taking my current state—and probably the fact that I was here and Callum and my team of guards hadn’t stopped me—as a sign that something was seriously wrong.
A better person would not have taken advantage of this fact. It was cruel, it was wrong, and it was stupid, but hey, it wasn’t like Marcus could possibly despise me more, and knowing that he’d be happy if Ali died rid me of any guilt I might have otherwise felt for playing him.
“It’s bad,” I said, letting the tears that I’d kept myself from shedding all day come. Marcus, smelling the truth in my words, didn’t notice that I hadn’t specified what was bad. “Might not make it.”
“Callum?” Marcus breathed. He gripped me with both arms, his fingers biting into my skin so hard that I could feel my flesh bruising. It occurred to me that I couldn’t make Callum’s condition sound too dire, because Callum was the only thing keeping me safe from Marcus, even now. “What’s wrong with you? Talk! Is Callum hurt?”